It’s clear by now that every new St. Vincent album is an artistic statement writ large. From at least her self-titled effort on, St. Vincent has moved with large swoops of purpose and a commitment to a degree of reinvention that writes a whole new thesis each time time, albeit one that is still recognizably in her hand. All Born Screaming, St. Vincent’s latest studio album, can be superficially evaluated as a return to the arch, agitated electro-pop that was more typical of her output before the 2021 outing Daddy’s Home. The naysayers who were dismissive of that seventies soul homage are sure to term the new album a retreat. I think that’s a mistake. As always, St. Vincent is roaring forward.

The purposeful assertion of All Born Screaming begins with the fast that, seven solo albums in, this is the first time St. Vincent is a solo producer of her own work. Although a passel of guest musicians join in — such as Dave Grohl on drums on a pair of tracks and Cate Le Bon playing bass and providing background vocals here and there — there’s a prevailing sense that this could really be a one-woman show. That’s how boldly present St. Vincent is across these tracks, how thoroughly her explorations expand into what feels little a total sense of her creative being in the moment she made it. In that sense, All Born Screaming feels like an gleaming artifact from the era of nineteen-seventies album rock, when artists practically declared, “Come inside my mind!” with each new release.

St. Vincent scatters ideas across the album like a kid who’s upended their toy box to cause all sorts of spring-loaded, wind-up contraptions skitter around the room. She can deliver the baroque, quietly intense opener “Hell Is Near” and the rapturous, layered intensity of the unsettling and thrilling “Broken Man” (“Hey, what are you looking at?/ Who the hell do you think I am?/ And what are you looking at?/ Like you never seen a broken man”). “Violent Times” is like her version of a Bond theme. Adventurous as they are, those cuts are straightforward when compared against other entries on the track list. At times, St. Vincent swerves around wildly without single songs. “Flea” initially strikes the ear as akin to the stern-eyed pop found on St. Vincent, and then it launches into elegant sonic explorations that eddy around into a sound that’s not that removed from high-quality fusion jazz, the sort that owes more to Bitches Brew than Pat Metheny. “So Many Planets” is like world music from another universe, and the title track is what might result from Joni Mitchell at the height of her own anti-pop venturing getting copied and stretched out by Talking Heads–brand Silly Putty.

“Big Time Nothing” might be the track that best illuminates where St. Vincent is at right now. It draws on the post-house, electropunk style of the Prodigy and other acts of that ilk, but St. Vincent injects it with lithe funk and performs it with a level of ease that recalls no less than the brilliance of Prince. I don’t make that comparison lightly. On All Born Screaming, St. Vincent is piercing the highest heights and drawing rarefied air.