St. Vincent performs for sold-out Rock Hall audience
nduction, sparring with the ghost of Kurt Cobain. She’s created a full album with David Byrne, proving her angular wit and rhythmic eccentricity could match one of rock’s most daring minds.
Clark has also traded licks with Pearl Jam and Taylor Swift, shared stages with Beck, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Roxy Music, Red Hot Chili Peppers and more. These aren’t just cameos. They’re acknowledgments.
On stage, the lineage and pedigree become something far more visceral. Her Cleveland performance at the Rock Hall bore that out. New York’s Gustaf, a gritty, Sonic Youth-inspired unit that felt like a breath of fresh air, opened the festivities. They were a perfect appetizer before we all dug into the main course.
Clark opened with “Reckless” from last year’s “All Born Screaming.” What began as a slow meditation on death and loss suddenly cracked open with a blast of synths, jarring the audience to life. That kind of bait-and-switch—comfort undone by chaos—is St. Vincent’s signature spell. She conjures well.
Her set moved on to “Fear the Future” (from her album “MASSEDUCTION”), where Clark stalked the stage in lockstep with the band’s industrial pulse. Then came “Los Ageless” and “Digital Witness,” the latter a sly critique of surveillance society disguised as a neon dance party. By then, the jam-packed Union Mortgage Plaza had transformed—swaying bodies, singing voices, a congregation once more pulled into her orbit.
Her last gig in Cleveland, at the Agora, was a gritty ode to 1970s NYC, a conceptual dive into “Daddy’s Home.” That gig was thrilling and theatrical in an offbeat, Scorsese kind of way.
Like David Bowie, like Kate Bush, like PJ Harvey, Clark is a master of metamorphosis. Each new album is a rebirth, each tour a reframing. She designs her own guitars, directs her own videos and has even her sent up her own persona in film (“The Nowhere Inn”).
If heirs of rock and roll are those who carry its spirit into “uncharted territory,” then St. Vincent isn’t just the heir apparent. She’s the present tense.