St. Vincent releases Pills, a bittersweet anthem about popping pills

Annie Clark’s new album MASSEDUCTION is out this Friday.

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Three long years since the release of her incredible self-titled 2014 record, Annie Clark – aka St Vincent – will release her new record MASSEDUCTION on Friday and she has one final gift before we get the full package. Having recently shared the visual to Los Ageless – her jab at our extreme obsession with beauty regimes and exploration of defying aging – today St. Vincent has shared the album’s third track in the bubbly yet bittersweet Pills. Pills has this really bubbly feel through the playfully upbeat combination of guitars, drums and Clark's vocal delivery, but at the song's core, Pills is a desperate, dark account of Clark’s experiences with prescribed drug use and addiction. “I spent a year suspended in air. My mind on the gap, my head on the stairs. From healers to dealers and then back again. From guru to voodoo and voodoo to zen,” she sings in one of the track's verses, before following it with a very similar theme in the chorus .“Pills to wake, pills to sleep. Pills, pills, pills every day of the week. Pills to walk, pills to think. Pills, pills, pills for the family. Pills to grow, pills to shrink. Pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink. Pills to fuck, pills to eat. Pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink." Pills is littered with dark undertones about deeply personal time in Clark’s life.

In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Clark gave some insight into the songs on MASSEDUCTION, including Pills: “The song wasn’t intended as this moral indictment of the state of the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. I don’t think it works to write finger-wagging songs, because it’s condescending to the audience and just a bummer to listen to," she says. "This song is super personal for me, a little snapshot of a small period of my life. I was having trouble sleeping and I had taken a sleeping pill. As I was popping it into my mouth, I was like, ‘Do-do-do, do-do-do, pills, pills, pills, every day of the week—oh, maybe that’s so jingle-y that it’s good.’ Just using that language of advertising.”