St. Vincent: Strange Mercy [4AD]

Why you'll love it

This 4AD pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with lyrics and credits, plus a download card. Strange Mercy reached No. 19 on the Billboard 200, earned Pitchfork's Best New Music and a Metacritic score of 85.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• Download card included

About the album

Some records are made in a crowd; this one was made in a hotel room. Annie Clark fled New York's information overload in late 2010, checked into Seattle's Ace Hotel and wrote the album alone, calling the stay a "loneliness experiment" and a cleanse. She then took the songs to Elmwood Studio in Dallas with John Congleton, who had produced Actor.

The result is her most personal record to that point, with lush strings and choirs constantly ambushed by her serrated, fuzzed-out guitar. "Chloe in the Afternoon" opens on a jolt, "Cruel" bounces along on a deceptively sunny groove, "Cheerleader" swells into one of her biggest choruses, and "Surgeon" takes its central line from Marilyn Monroe's journal. Hiro Murai's video for "Cheerleader" turned Clark into a giant gallery sculpture, inspired by the artist Ron Mueck.

In 2014 Pitchfork named it the 23rd best album of the decade so far, and it set up the run that followed. To unlock "Surgeon" before the album came out, she asked fans to tweet a hashtag, which remains the politest ransom demand in rock.

Also at Kops: more St. Vincent on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# CAD 3123), the 2011 album.