We like this era a bit better…

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Harlan Talib Ockey: In 2014, St. Vincent released a self-titled album, saying “the hardest thing for a musician to do is sound like yourself.” In 2017, she decided that was too hard and pivoted to glossy, scripted “pop-level intention.” (For the record, I still liked it.) In 2021, another pivot to ‘70s cosplay. (Not a fan.) Now, after ten years, she finally returns to something that sounds like an evolution of the St. Vincent concept. “Broken Man” is the primal, slow-burning, ‘90s-industrial brother of “Bring Me Your Loves” and “Birth in Reverse”. The bass is a half-dead cement mixer. The guitars are a cannon blast. The drums are pedestrian enough to have not required a celebrity guest, honestly. With “Broken Man” posing like St. Vincent’s last two albums never happened, you could argue that this is a strange and disappointing step back. And in some ways, it is; the idea that an artist might be disowning their own progress is upsetting, and I would feel a little better knowing there were signs of Masseduction elsewhere on the album. For now, however, I’m choosing to say “neat, I loved St. Vincent (2014), this seems pretty cool.” 
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Katherine St. Asaph: An exhibition of sudden swerves: the thrilling swerve when the guitars come in to shatter the skeletal restraint, something you knew was coming but not that sudden or that big; and the slight letdown of a swerve when the song turns out to not be Annie Clark indulging her inner Trent Reznor, but Annie Clark indulging her inner Mac Aladdin.
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Alfred Soto: Annie’s Clark restlessness is a strength regardless of the consequences. “Who do you think I am?” she asks wearily over skronked-up guitars, as if tired of reminding us. The rest of “Broken Man” uses Clark’s impatient jabbing warble as a series of provocations. It could move faster.
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Leah Isobel: I don’t get it.
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Hannah Jocelyn: For the last decade, if I’ve wanted to listen to St. Vincent, I’ve just listened to Torres imbuing Annie Clark’s fuzziness with extravagant theater kid energy (the highest compliment I can give). But Torres’ album this year was a surprising disappointment, so St. Vincent wins this round with a “Dance Yrself Clean”-sized volume jump and a crunchy, restless arrangement. Not to put two genderless guitar gods against each other, of course!  
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At this point I’m getting nostalgic for St. Vincent albums I didn’t even like – the Goats Head Soup worship of the last record did not inspire joy in me but at least it was an ethos of some kind (and I’ll stand by “Down” as some of the finest electric sitar playing by a white person in the 21st century.) This is just rote alt rock fodder, a vague sketch of industrial textures without any hook or distinguishing characteristic other than the loudness of Dave Grohl’s fills.  
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Nortey Dowuona: The drum breaks from Dave Grohl, Cian Riordan and Mark Gulliana take place in three places; the first drum fill, the second bridge programming, the outro groove. The final one swallows the first threadbare drum programming, largely unable to hold the weight of St. Vincent’s thin topline, bulky guitar and thinned-out synthesizers. The melody is novel, floating atop the simple synth riff and becoming foggy and weepy at the bridge. Then the sudden avalanche of sound in the outro groove kicks the song into gear, enlivening a tense arrangement and adding muscle to the thin synth riff that remains looping at the center. The sudden ending leaves you broken in half, staring at the concrete and not knowing whether to crawl or crumple.
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Taylor Alatorre: The abrupt transition from abattoir atmospherics to an unchained “Get the Led Out” session brings to mind, of all things, the famously ambiguous ending of Taxi Driver. Did Travis Bickle really achieve a heroic redemption through the full flowering of his violent masculine instincts, or was it all a dying dream; and what lessons is the viewer meant to draw from either one? Whether Clark intended it this way, the heavy-blues riffage is bound to come off as triumphal after so much austere bleakness, and unfortunately it’s a bland sort of triumph that doesn’t feel fully earned, narratively or musically. It might have been a better illustration of the song‘s themes to reverse the sequence of the two main sections, so that the brokenness became more instead of less apparent over time. Would make for less of a concert crowd-pleaser, though.
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Isabel Cole: St. Vincent channels both Karen O’s snarling, twisting yowl and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ glitter-grime ambience to craft something tight and tense, fun with an edge of darkness that keeps building as if the song is straining against itself until it explodes. Listening to this feels like watching someone strut down a runway built in a junkyard, rhinestones glinting off her dirty fingernails until she lights a match and sets fire to the stage.
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Ian Mathers: I truly don’t know whether it’s her or me, but I used to hear a new St. Vincent single or album and feel the shock of the new, or at least of a distinctive voice. This is fine, and the guitar playing is certainly still bracing, but it just feels so much less… distinct. I don’t want something that sounds like “Cruel” or “Digital Witness” or “Actor Out of Work,” but I do want something that makes me feel the way all of those did.
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