Daddy's Home
| St. Vincent
Daddy's Home
Daddy's Home is the sixth studio album by American musician St. Vincent, released on May 14, 2021 by Loma Vista Recordings. Like its predecessor, Masseduction (2017), Annie Clark produced the album alongside Jack Antonoff. Daddy's Home was inspired by Clark's father's release from prison at the end of 2019, as well as the musical palette of New York City in the first half of the 1970s. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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The Guardian
master of reinvention warps the sounds of the 70s.
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Slate
St. Vincent’s Newest Record Is Also Her Worst.
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The Guardian
Channelling 70s New York funk and her father’s release from prison, the ever brilliant Annie Clark loosens up on her engagingly soulful sixth album.
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Pop Matters
It takes a real human being to be as disgusted with the world as the performance of St Vincent on Daddy’s Home shows. It requires the talents of Annie Clark.
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The Ringer
Daddy’s Home does, indeed, sound like an extra-louche and near-comatose Steely Dan antihero rudely roused via air horn from a Lower East Side gutter.
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Stereogum
Daddy’s Home was plausibly an opportunity to go back to Clark’s own origin stories to rewrite St. Vincent, incorporating some her personal history more explicitly. Instead, it mostly feels listless and lost within its own distant universe — one that we recognize the language of but one with a graininess that, this time around, keeps new revelations at bay.
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MSN
There is no obligation for any artist to bare their soul, of course, but I do find the disconnect between the hugely personal album title and the oddly impersonal album it represents to be quite jarring. It is somehow rich and hollow all at once. Who is she trying to be? Perhaps she doesn’t know yet.
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NME
this ’70s funk pastiche is her warmest album yet.
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Sputnik Music
True to both character and the album’s palette it may be, but it’s far from her strongest statement and fails to carry a set of songs that all too often need a push in the right direction.
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The Wall Street Journal
“Daddy’s Home” can’t quite match Ms. Clark’s 2014 album “St. Vincent” or 2011’s “Strange Mercy” on a song-by-song basis, and her brand of dense, off-kilter art pop remains impenetrable to those not in tune with her frequency. But this record’s carefully unfolding structure gives it an emotional punch that builds with each song, landing it among her best.
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The Fire Note
One of the most intriguing aspects of the musical artistry of St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, is that as she adapts her musical style to match the artistic aim of each project, she evolves in the way she presents herself, adapting a character to fit the concept. On her 6th album, Daddy’s Home, she’s conceived a song cycle centered around the 2019 release of her father from nearly a decade in prison for white collar crime, looking back to the early influence she took from his record collection dominated by early 70’s recordings that captured the steamy urban drama of New York City nightlife.
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Louder than War
Like a brilliant shape-shifting chameleon, Annie Clark, who has already morphed into space-age superstar St. Vincent, is always restlessly on the move. Daddy’s Home is brilliant space-age glam pop with a deep emotional undercurrent.
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AV Club
This is a record in love with the bygone spirits it conjures, and even the sparsest tracks sound like they’ve been punctiliously determined. It’s an album that sounds like it wants to be messy, yet is anything but.
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Riot Magazine
St. Vincent’s sixth studio album is at once a lush playground, an intimate confessional, and an alluring invitation. You’ll be glad you stayed a while.
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Beats Per Minute
Clark flips between that groovy funk of the 70s, then back to her guitar rock days, and then, sure, she employs some more experimental and electronic moments that might come across as jarring to some. But it’s also just part of the brand that is St. Vincent in 2021.
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Vinyl Chapters
Daddy’s Home from St. Vincent is the perfect amalgamation of warm, 70s funk layered beneath unique and ever-inventive pop production. Harsh realities may have inspired the record but supreme musicianship and cleverly written tracks are what hold it all together.
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The Wee Review
Introspection and retro influences make for a satisfying album.
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Bernard Zuel
An extension of this concept is that Daddy’s Home, musically as much as lyrically, works less like one story than a series of vignettes, less like an album than a stage musical. It’s clever and driven but kept at one remove, warmer than Masseduction but not as cohesive, brittle and tonally muted but brassy in its boldness – or maybe offhandedness.
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Higher Plain Music
That aside, this plunge back to 1973 is largely a big success. This is easily the least hook filled album she has created to date but its all about the mood. In a way, its a bit of a dissection of the 70’s funk rock and soul genres through a 2021 lens of an ugly world. Everything you expect is here but there is a pointed edge to the production that means most of the music doesn’t feel tape warmed. It feels a bit angular, aggressive and full. That might put a few off but I welcome the interesting take on things. One thing we do know though. Whatever she tackles next, it won’t sound like this – so enjoy or politely disagree – she’ll have moved on soon enough.
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Slant Magazine
The artist’s sixth solo album matches pitch-perfect ‘70s-retro stylings with testy lyrical themes.
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Hotpress
Daddy's Home finds St. Vincent taking back the reins – telling her own story on her own terms, while exploring a captivating new direction in her sound.
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The Line of Best Fit
St. Vincent is here to blow our minds on the rich, powerful and golden Daddy’s Home.
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Under the Radar Magazine
Daddy’s Home is a record that inspires mixed emotions. For those fans who have enjoyed, or indeed been introduced to St. Vincent as a result of her more futuristic endeavors, this will definitely prove a harsh left-turn, but for those listeners who come to this record having never really gotten on with St. Vincent’s music in the past, there would seem to be more approachable material here. It’s difficult to say with any certainty how successful Clark’s first true venture into nostalgia has been—it is less likely to evolve in people’s estimations as her previous few records have—but there is a warmth and a general coziness that exists on this project, the likes of which she has never produced before.
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Varsity
In Daddy’s Home, St. Vincent isn’t just self-indulgently proclaiming that she was ‘born in the wrong era’, instead she is interrogating Old America and how it seeps into current relationships. It’s not faultless and some of the interludes could easily have been scrapped, yet there’s something thematically fitting about an almost perfect album with just a few bits of paint left peeling off the walls.
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Audioxide
Daddy’s Home may not have the standalone hits of, say, St. Vincent’s self-titled record, but its overall picture is brighter and more fully formed - in a dirty, sad New York City kind of way.
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Contact Music
It's imperfect and yet masterful, with so much emotion and sincerity to it that St. Vincent has well and truly set the bar sky high for 2021.
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Loud and Quiet
In aesthetic terms, Daddy’s Home might not quite be the boldest or most arresting artistic statement we’ve seen from St Vincent, but considering she’s among the most consistently innovative and compelling artists of her generation, that’s hardly a failure. It is, however, easily her most coherent and candid yet; whoever she becomes next, this Annie Clark has achieved something special.
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The Alternative
Ultimately, Daddy’s Home fails in how much it gets in its own head, and how impulsive everything around it appears to have been. From the outside, it looks like a passion project that at no point was ever halted for second opinions. On the bright side, Clark’s need for reinvention can save her. She can easily pivot to whatever tickles her fancy next, results to be determined.
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Metro Weekly
Daddy’s Home is by no means her strongest album, but it is buoyed by a strong, cohesive sound and a healthy sense of irony that make for a compelling detour from both the self-lacerating baroque pop of her early years and the artsy frenzy of her more recent work.
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The Needle Drop
The strongest St. Vincent album since Strange Mercy.
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Crack Magazine
It already feels like an essential detour in the broader St. Vincent cosmology, proof that the Duchess can attach both her inspirations and her heart on her sleeve without ever losing sight of the wild, weird chanteuse at the centre of it all.
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Peanut Butter Pope
Emotional disparity moves to the front on ‘Daddy’s Home’, ahead of weirdness and compositional brightness.
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All Music
Control, or lack of it, is also a vital element on Daddy's Home. Using her father's return from jail for white-collar crime as a jumping-off point, Clark explores moral grey areas on songs that are as diffuse as her past few albums were taut. Her musical world-building remains as impressive as ever: Drawing on early-'70s sounds introduced to her by her father, she pays homage to a more permissive time as she traces the best and worst things carried through the generations.
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The Spokesman-Review
Even though Clark draws from many sources throughout “Daddy’s Home,” her music is clearly her own. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a number of other iconoclasts have done the same. Unlike the dinosaurs of rock, Clark has much left in the tank. Who knows what she’ll do next, but I for one can’t wait.
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Narc Magazine
A CANDID AND ENCHANTING ALBUM FROM THE ART POP ICON.
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Stereoboard
On ‘Daddy’s Home’, St. Vincent has taken the reins of her own emotional journey, but she also revels in the album’s tongue-in-cheek flair and playfulness. Giving us just a peek into her vulnerability, she abruptly turns on her heels to strut away.
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The Times
the patron saint of arty escapism.
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Pitchfork
Annie Clark brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record occasionally beset by clunky choices.
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Daily Mail
Daddy's Home delivers one highlight after another.
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Clash Magazine
‘Daddy’s Home’ reaches for the classic while analysing the flaws and failings of those we love. It’s a record about growing up, and playing it straight; a more open, rounded experience than we’ve come to expect from St. Vincent, it’s a brave, fascinating record.
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Redbrick Music
St. Vincent has not disappointed in her long-anticipated return with new album Daddy’s Home.
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Panorama of the Mountains
On Daddy’s Home, the glam rock and pop noise of the past have been replaced by a soul and funk sound joined together thematically around the idea of New York City in the 1970s. The album title is inspired by Clark’s actual father’s release from prison after serving time for a decade for stock manipulation, but Clark suggests this is more metaphorical than biographical. To me, this album feels like a return to form for St. Vincent, which means it’s something new and experimental.
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Gigwise
Unapologetically suave and full of excitement.
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The Au Review
Daddy’s Home sees St. Vincent at her most eclectic and triumphant.
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Stack
Reinvention is key to St. Vincent, an artist who’s never guilty of producing the same record twice, but rather subverting conventions for a sound that is both singular and daring.
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Ben's beat
It’s never easy to anticipate what you might get from a St. Vincent album, but it’s always going to be a rewarding experience in some way or another. Jack Antonoff has long made his career aiding some of the greatest storytellers in the music industry, and the trend continues here. It takes a little time to fully hit, but this was the hardest time I’ve had all year picking out a “Least Favourite Track.”
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Silent Radio
What is clear from this project, even with the odd misstep is that Clark and Antonoff are a perfect combination. St Vincent continues to deliver on every album, and you’ll never be void of personality, surprises or soul when she releases a body of work into the world.
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The Arts Desk
Real-life nostalgia fuels a funk-soul reinvention.
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Spectrum Culture
On Daddy’s Home, Annie Clark assumes the role of daddy, the smoky, swarthy ‘70s inspired image not of masculinity but of swagger.
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Glide Magazine
With a few exceptions, Daddy’s Home doesn’t have the show-stopping, what-just-happened hooks of other St. Vincent releases. Yet it is the most eclectic St. Vincent album, juxtaposing calm soul-searching acoustic ballads with funky dance grooves, frenetic claustrophobia with sprawling psychedelia, fuzzed-out guitar with clean finger-picking. It is a new style for St. Vincent but because of its attitude, humor, and off-kilter compositions, it still feels very St. Vincent.
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Exclaim
St. Vincent Makes the Most of Her Dive into '70s Shimmer on 'Daddy's Home'.
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The Forty-Five
The American artist's sixth album borrows from the wardrobe, record collection, and social unrest of the seventies – but 'Daddy's Home' is as much 2021 as 1971.
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