St. Vincent - Daddy's Home
Critic Score
Based on 38 reviews
2021 Ratings: #46 / 753
Year End Rank: #23
User Score
2021 Rank: #58
Liked by 482 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Gigwise
Dishing out an evocative explosion of crooning melodies, abstract coolness and an ardent passion for motifs from a seedy metropolis, St Vincent succeeds in her exquisite vision.
100
The Independent
It sounds – for the first time in a decade – like Clark has slipped out of her high heels and found an equal strength in this barefooted soul.
100
Mojo

It's masterful stuff: a full conceptual realisation, filled with great melodies, deep grooves, colourful characterisations and sonic detail that reveals itself over repeated plays ... Even if its heart is in the '70s, Daddy's Home is a keeper for the decades to come.

100
The Guardian
It’s all hugely impressive and striking, the familiar made subtly unfamiliar, Clark’s famously incendiary guitar playing spinning off at unexpected and occasionally atonal tangents, its effect simultaneously heady and disturbing.
100
DIY
On all fronts, with ‘Daddy’s Home’, St Vincent has delivered spectacularly.
90
The Needle Drop

The strongest St. Vincent album since Strange Mercy.

90
The Line of Best Fit
Forget everything you thought you knew about St. Vincent, because this is Annie Clark 2.0, beamed in from an alternate reality, ready to blow your mind. Daddy’s home, and she’s sounding better than ever.
90
musicOMH

Daddy’s Home may lack the more exhilarating, guitar-shredding moments of some of Clark’s earlier work, but it’s possibly her best, most considered album to date.

90
PopMatters

A shining, spectacular addition to her discography, one you had no idea you needed, in many ways a return to her old, Marry Me/Actor era sound with all the aural benefits of being post-Masseduction. This is St. Vincent in the '20s and she is glorious.

80
Under the Radar
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.
80
RIOT
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.
80
Evening Standard
Despite the dark context of the album, Annie Clark sounds the most relaxed she ever has on record.
80
The Irish Times
Using character-driven sleaze that dips into reality, Annie Clark’s sixth album is a personal and fantastical adventure.
80
The Forty-Five
‘Daddy’s Home’ may be another artistic regeneration, but nostalgia and looser grooves mask gnarly topics: behind the sepia sunglasses St Vincent burrows closer to home than ever before, skewering society in the process.
80
Record Collector

Annie Clark lures us into the sleazy underbelly of 70s New York on funky-sounding sixth ... The sassy pansexual swagger of 2017's Masseduction survives, but there's a generous allowance of warmth and melancholy.

80
The Arts Desk

The soul and funk stylings of this, her sixth album, are of the music her father introduced her to as a child; the title Daddy’s Home less in reference to his release from prison – although that’s in there too, Clark signing autographs in the visiting room and “doing time too” – than a reckoning with those roots.

80
Dork
The sepia tone works for the record’s sense of tarnished glamour, and manages not to tip over into on-the-nose nostalgia. Six records in, St Vincent is still reinventing.
80
The Observer
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.
80
The Telegraph

The sublime Melting of the Sun honours such female musical pioneers as Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos – women who gave Clark the confidence to follow her own iconoclastic path. Daddy’s Home is further proof that St Vincent deserves to be considered in their stellar ranks.

80
AllMusic

Daddy's Home takes time to unfold in listeners' imaginations. It's much more of a mood than anything else in her body of work, but its hazy reconciliation of the good and bad of the past makes it as an uncompromising statement from her as ever.

80
Crack Magazine

Though this is her most referential album by a longshot, never once does Daddy’s Home veer into mere caricature. It already feels like an essential detour in the broader St. Vincent cosmology.

80
NME
Daddy’s Home’ is Clark’s most welcoming record yet, defined by an arch humour which also brings its listeners closer than ever, and filled with compassion for the characters who dwell within it.
80
Uncut
Yes she’s still arch and meta and provocative, still complex and mischievous and ambitious. But on this record, Annie Clark seems to stand just a little closer.
80
Clash
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.
80
Loud and Quiet

Daddy’s Home feels like a real moment for Clark; not only is it an incredibly successful metamorphosis, the album goes some way to resolving many of the tensions at the heart of her music, without doing her the disservice of showing her hand entirely.

80
Slant Magazine

Daddy’s Home is slicker and more professional—and resultantly, more conventional—than anything she’s released to date. And yet, the album’s pitch-perfect ‘70s-retro stylings and testy lyrical themes are just as challenging as anything on 2011’s Strange Mercy.

80
Rolling Stone
Annie Clark recorded her latest wth superproducer Jack Antonoff, arriving at a mutant strain of retro pop steeped in New York lore and evoking anything from Lou Reed to Sheena Easton.
80
Exclaim!

While Daddy's Home may not be her best record, it's a bold and rewarding one. And if what we expect from our artists is art — uncompromising, singular, sometimes clumsy and rife with feelings or stories both understandable and not —  then few comprehend the exchange quite like St. Vincent.

80
The Skinny

Despite St. Vincent’s decade-spanning career as such a forward-looking artist, her latest effort serves up a more retro flavour.

78
Paste
Annie Clark’s ‘70s-inspired songs are masterful, but lack cohesion outside the album’s detached, irrelevant concept.
77
Beats Per Minute
The final result finds her not back-pedalling, but revisiting her former glories from a new perspective. It’s a topsy-turvy balancing act that she’s playing, but for the most part it’s successful.
75
Northern Transmissions
Most of the 14 songs are weary. Electric sitar adds a psychedelic patina. The album’s glow flickers like worn neon signs the run-down narrators straggle past.
75
A.V. Club

Like a Tarantino film, Daddy’s Home mines the real to make something above it, a hyperreal daydream of layabouts and losers, wronged women and wrong men, all loving and losing in the late nights of a long-ago past brought into the present.

70
Spectrum Culture

St. Vincent’s transition to daddy mostly functions because of the depth of the compositions. Daddy’s Home veers on unctuous at certain points but there’s always another layer, another guitar lick, another buried groove, on these intricate mixes.

67
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.
60
Sputnikmusic

Daddy’s Home’s wooziness and postulation frequently scan as indulgences enabled by its seventies roots rather than incisive takes on its subject matter.

60
No Ripcord

Weighed down by its own concept and bloated with references, there’s just no room left for emotional reckoning.

Chode
80

There’s never a dull moment in the world of Annie Clark.

The antithesis of anything predictable, St. Vincent is an artist with an eye always focused on renovation. Between the dance-floor-ready synthesized mazes of ‘MassEducation’ to the low-fidelity guitar-studded indie-pop of her self-titled record, St. Vincent’s motivation and inspiration never appears to peter out, refusing to fall into one singular classifiable niche, and she shows no sign of running arid on ideas ... read more

Doublez
81

St Vincent has the art and the way to offer an absolutely touching and very personal work but she invites you to be fully part of it, as if you were in flesh and blood propelled in deeply buried memories.

There are those who have only written a few pages or a few chapters without ever managing to keep that spark alive, and then there are those who can be counted on the fingers of one hand who go on and on without losing a grain of favour. We can for example refer to St Vincent, one of the ... read more

BaddieBaphomet
90

Always being one to reinvent herself with each album cycle, it makes sense that Annie Clark, known by most as St. Vincent, would follow up her most hyperkinetic, futuristic, and tightest record with something looser and dirtier that reflects on the past. While it’s probably the biggest step away from her older work characterized by noisy, alien production and guitar work, “Daddy’s Home” is some of her finest collection of songs to date and still manages to embody the ... read more

Firmino23vevo
90

The first run of tracks is a bit stronger than the finish, but antonoff's production in sync with St Vincents songwriting and personality is a golden mix. It is funny how Jack goes off so often for other artists then comes back to bleachers and makes them feed off of scraps.

Radguy69420
98

My favorite St. Vincent album

contessa
71

she had a bob and a dream

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Added on: December 15, 2020