St. Vincent

Guitar-slinging art-rocker St. Vincent is an enigma illuminated by very public headlines. While she earned her alternative-music bona fides through stints in The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens' band, her solo career has consisted largely of erasing, defacing and subverting her appearance and talent. Born Annie Clark in 1982 and raised in Dallas, her parents divorced when she was three. Her father's 2010 prison sentence for stock manipulation informs a pair of Clark’s albums: 2011's alternately gorgeous and caterwauling Strange Mercy and, following his release a decade later, the compassionate grime of Daddy's Home. Clark etched both the joys and the suicidal thoughts that stemmed from another public spectacle—her 18-month, paparazzi-fodder relationship with British supermodel Cara Delevingne—into the beats, synths and sonic disruptions of 2017’s Jack Antonoff-produced MASSEDUCTION. But Clark's earlier releases are equally bracing, if less transparently self-reflective. She followed her 2007 debut, Marry Me, with Actor, a lushly orchestrated meditation on performance in general and film in particular. And she found an equally oddball fellow traveller in David Byrne, with whom she collaborated on 2012's Love This Giant—but who admitted, even after a year of touring with Clark, that the rocking performance artist remained a mystery to him.