GUEST EDITOR ST.VINCENT

Since the release of her 2007 debut album, Marry Me, the Texan-born, guitar-shredding St. Vincent has continued to reinvent herself, dabbling in synth-pop, hard rock and everything in between. Like Bowie before her, she’s played with, and prodded at, the idea of persona. For the release of 2017’s Masseduction a time she calls her dominatrix at the mental institution’ era she dressed only in latex, insisting journalists interview her decidedly prickly) alter-ego inside a neon pink box. During 2021's Daddy’s Home, she was a louche, 1970s gangster, in a flared two-piece and blonde bob wig. And for mockumentary The Nowhere Inn, directed by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, she portrayed a heightened and hideous) self-obsessed version of herself. It wasn’t great for my career, she notes, dryly. Wondering who St. Vincent would become next and who she really is has all been part of the game. But in 2024, that changed. Her eighth album, All Born Screaming, is a ferocious exploration of what it is to be alive; the sound heavier, the visuals dark and uncanny. She has ditched the costume and character and is, perhaps for the first time, just Annie Clark. Seventeen years into her career, we invite a truly shapeshifting artist to take the reins of Wallpaper” as guest editor to understand her multidisciplinary creative process, what fuels her fire, and where this bizarre road might take St. Vincent next.

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Alex Da Corte and I are walking through the Prado in Madrid, surrounded by the treasures of the art world. Yet some, despite their beauty or painterly perfection, are so easy to walk past. Another era. Jesus and Mary. Portraits of nobles, kings and queens. More Jesus and Mary.

Alex points out the pre-Renaissance genre of ‘world landscape’, before painters knew how to paint perspective; before there was a vanishing point, before there was scale, where every object in the frame – no matter the importance – carries the same weight. It makes me think of the internet. I say as much to Alex and he laughs.

We are not studious tourists or completists. We haven’t brought a checklist. We do not feel compelled to study every brushstroke, read every placard, squint and hum. We float, pulled along by a supernatural current of instinct and chance. We only stop and stare at what calls to us from eternity. Yes, yes, centuries ago. Different time, different rulers, different plague, different wars, but the same human condition. This is it: eternity. What we try, like mad but occasionally contented Sisyphi, to channel into our own work.

We are called to a small room: Goya’s Black Paintings. The temperature falls 15 – no, 20 – degrees. You felt that too, right? The air, like a gunshot. I immediately lock eyes with Saturn Devouring His Son. I don’t know why, but I understand this mania, this violence. How many sons did it take to get to THIS look in his eyes? Was this the taste of first flesh? The third son going down? The final gnashing and gulp?