The Singles Jukebox

Annie: not OK, at least on this single.

[Video]
[4.12]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Well, this sounds like Goats Head Soup, Talking Book, and Young Americans all piled into the screwed-up teleporting machines from The Fly, so the level of appeal to me personally is off the charts — but is it actually good? Meh. As much as I love this concept, there’s a disappointing reluctance to innovate within its early ’70s framework; apart from the central synth riff’s timbre, which is more “barely restrained foghorn” than clavinet, there aren’t any obvious clues this was made in 2021. That might be a plus for an artist with no interesting modern inclinations to bring to the table, but it’s mildly upsetting to hear from St. Vincent.
[6]

Hazel Southwell: Perfectly competent karaoke pastiche of things black women have been doing for decades, I guess?
[2]

Vikram Joseph: Annie Clark has never been afraid of strangeness and dissonance, even on her lead singles, but even by her standards “Pay Your Way In Pain” is bracingly weird. A hallucinatory fable of setbacks and disappointments coupled to a juddering electronic beat, filtered through Prince and Bowie, it’s a funk-blues nightmare that feels like it’s probably about sex on some level but which is also far too disorientating to be sexy. There are some standout moments — the call-and-response bridge, “stand up, sit down, hands up, break down,” Clark’s long scream into the void that closes the song — but after about ten listens I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. It will, no doubt, make more sense in the context of the album, as St. Vincent singles generally do.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’m caught between admiring the ugliness of this and wondering what the point is — having made too many good songs, has Annie Clark decided to instead make impressively bad ones? Is there something underpinning this 1974-1978 kitsch other than wanting to make a slightly chopped and screwed version of “Shattered” with some Bowie grafted on? It’s a compelling song to consider. It’s not as fun to listen to.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Bad as a 70s art pop pastiche, worse if you also hear “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” in the synths. Just an unpleasant wafting gas of a song, really, a fart.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: As much as it pains (no pun intended) me to get off the St. Vincent bandwagon both a) just after she’d gotten really good or b) timed exactly to the backlash brewing over the album concept, this is a competent pastiche of things I mostly don’t like. And the one I do — “Sweet Dreams”; if the synth wasn’t a giveaway, the bridge is one note off “hold your head up/keep your head up” — has plenty of more complete pastiches.
[4]

Andrew Karpan: In a promotional video that accompanied the single’s release, Annie Clark announced the beginning of her newest promotional cycle by picking up the phone, a dramatic set-piece shot in a style meant to evoke the “grim” realist movies of the 70s. It follows that she sings about them too: detailing a series of quotidian activities, like going to a grocery store and then going to a bank and, most memorably, going to a playground in heels, where local mothers tell her “I wasn’t welcome.” While the song’s parody of David Bowie’s “Fame” is so dutifully clocked that the choice reveals itself as barren of inspiration, I liked this image of St. Vincent, haunting playgrounds like a ghost, an ambient picture that lacks plot but conveys unease. 
[5]

Juana Giaimo: It makes me sad how St. Vincent has gone from being one of my favorite artists of my teenage years to someone with whom I can’t connect at all. When I listen to her old records, I can still see why I liked her so much: she was always experimental and a great guitar player, but even better were her melodies. “Pay Your Way in Pain” is a example of what she’s been up to in the last couple of years. She seems to scream all the time “Hey, look at me! I’m weird!”, and she stresses it so much that it’s hard for me to take it seriously. The rough production doesn’t help the already hard to follow song structure. It’s full of noises that don’t make sense and the vocal manipulation is invasive. It’s all taken to the extreme in the post-chorus, with that question and answer conversation she has with a funny sounding high-pitched voice while she tries to show off her more soulful vocals. “I wanna be loved” she sings, but I feel she is constantly trying to be unlovable.
[3]