Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 09.34 EST
The cover of St Vincentâs 2011 album, Strange Mercy, depicts an open mouth and teeth shrink-wrapped in white latex. It provoked much fascination. Was it Annie Clarkâs mouth? She wouldnât say. One song involved a pearl-handled whip, wielded for pain over pleasure; others negotiated submission and debasement. Perhaps it was a BDSM thing?
The startled questions showed the overnight evolution of Clarkâs image from the âasexual Pollyannaâ (her words) of her first two records. Over the following decade, she restyled herself as a white-haired ânear-future cult leaderâ and then a âdominatrix at the mental institutionâ. She transcended her indie-rock origins to work with David Byrne, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, date the model Cara Delevingne and front Tiffany campaigns. Confounding such a journey into celebrity, her pyrotechnic pop got stranger and stronger.
Blimey, that went quickly!
The end of 2014 is nigh, and we’ve heard some cracking songs in its oh so brief existence. From Future Islands to ‘Fancy’, everyone’s got their favourite and they’re all completely different from each other. To find some order in the chaos, we asked over 30 Drowned In Sound staffers to vote for their top five singles of the year, then added up the results and made a list of the 40 most popular choices.
Read on for the final, definitive compendium and then subscribe to our Spotify playlist to listen to all the tracks in order.