Annie Clark seems like the kind of person who would name her fourth album St. Vincent and then quietly snicker when people referred to it as "self-titled." Since 2007’s debut Marry Me, Clark’s entire aesthetic derives from deep immersion into not just various personae, but into the very idea of persona. When she sung the phrase "I’m not anything" less than a minute into her first album, after all, she repeated the word "any" seven times—shedding its semantic skin and becoming a declaration of principle: "I’m not Annie, Annie, Annie, Annie…" "Digital Witness" is her latest statement of purpose, and it’s her most political yet. Twenty-first century media immersion is the target, and as if coming from Clark’s giant face beaming from the side of a blank building façade in a dystopian near-future, she intones: "I want all of your mind."

Or perhaps it’s more mundane than that. In 1978, Clark’s erstwhile collaborator and primary influence David Byrne wrote a song about a couple who decided to make their own sitcoms, because their TV reception sucked and nothing good was ever on, anyway. Thirty-six years later, faced with massive, wall-mounted flatscreen monitors showing imagery with higher definition than reality itself, Clark declares, "people turn the TV on it looks just like a window." If watching TV has become more real than the 3D version outside, then what’s to be done with the miniature TVs in our pockets? The chorus, which transforms the verses’ funk-by-Mondrian into something more cathedral-shaped, addresses this via a mini-thinkpiece on selfiehood, contrasting everyday acts shot to be witnessed with the need for (private) confession.

Though on the surface, Clark asking "What’s the point of even sleeping?" resonates like an out-of-touch crank who still has a flip-phone, it’s more likely that she’s thinking along the lines of a filmmaker who asked a similar question a half-century ago. What if the point of sleeping was to be watched doing so? "We have this feeling that we're being watched, and our psychic response is to make ourselves transparent," Clark explained earlier this year. "The real currency in the future will be privacy." This is true, but it also might be part of an artistic long con for Clark: if average lives enter permanent airplane mode, that means top-notch performers like Clark herself (if not 2014’s most noteworthy digital witnesses) can assume the throne. Watching her mechanistically perfect live performances of "Witness", it’s hard not to think that this is Clark’s goal for this particular St. Vincent mission statement: establishing the artist’s performance as a sacred place. Get back to your seats. —Eric Harvey