St. Vincent Vinyl Records
With her literate, emotionally intricate songwriting and inventive guitar playing, St. Vincent's Annie Clark excels at subverting rock and pop conventions. A Berklee School of Music student whose love of grunge acts like Nirvana and Soundgarden inspired her to learn guitar, she introduced her genre-bending approach on 2007's Marry Me, which fused elements of indie, rock, electronic, and jazz in surprising ways. From there, her increasingly accomplished albums revealed the breadth and depth of her music. As the years passed, she achieved a rare balance of critical and commercial success.