There was a time when Lindsey Jordan harboured the illusion that she could only write in her Maryland childhood bedroom, where she made the songs that brought her indie fame right on the cusp of adulthood. Penning much of her last Snail Mail album, Valentine, in her parents’ house, if only due to the pandemic, fed into that creative suspicion. She was probably in the same place when she read an interview that mentioned Kim Deal using her first big Pixies paycheck to buy a house, setting that goal early in her career. She’d fulfilled it by the time she was in the process of making her latest record, Ricochet, dodging any impulse to write somewhere more nostalgically familiar. Working with Aron Kobayashi Ritch, the bassist and producer of New York’s Momma, it finds her transposing a period of self-imposed yet heavenly isolation into her most comfortably subdued songs to date. There’s still a delicate tension gnawing beneath the surface, as solitude’s gorgeous quiet borders on obsessive dissocation. Jordan, though, will go a long way to dance around it.
1. Tractor Beam
The jangly guitars that chime in at the start of Ricochet are luminous but not quite radiant, retaining their clean, measured tone as the rest of the instrumentation rushes in. It’s reflective of Jordan’s overall headspace, her sky-gazing optimism tempered by the emotional gravity of a doomed relationship. Even in her dissociation, the music keeps spinning upward, a whole string section swirling around her as she stresses the last words of the final line: “But you can’t find anyone else like me.”
2. My Maker
Instead of getting more abstract, Jordan’s preoccupation with mortality becomes a practical endeavour: “I wanna fly a plane to heaven,” begins ‘My Maker’, though in the accompanying video she rides in a hot air balloon. Despite lines like “What if nothing matters?” she confidently avoids accusations of nihilism, delivering the line “Tonight I’m gonna my maker” with more conviction than you’d expect. She makes sure to colour in the edges of the production with synth and guitar squiggles that propel the song’s stratospheric alt-rock. Waiting around to die rarely sounds so plainly wondrous.
3. Light on Our Feet
Possibly the most romantic song in the Snail Mail catalog contains no hint of frustration or regret – in a natural progression from ‘My Maker’, not even the thought of dying can spread her bliss thin. Anchored by a featherlight guitar and low-end-filling violin, the singer fixates on the carnival lights dancing around her lover’s eyes, but they aren’t star-crossed so much as moon-bound: when it’s all over, the ballet simply continues up in space. “Fantasy is pulling at the seams,” she admits at one point, but not enough to tear the song apart.
4. Cruise
What was that about a lack of frustration? “Sick with a rage I can’t contain,” she sings, “Sweeter than candy in my veins.” Jordan’s affinity for sentimental ‘90s rock – she covered Goo Goo Dolls’ ‘Iris’ way before it was in vogue – bears its mark on ‘Cruise’, especially with its big studio drums. But none of those signifiers overshadow her persistent desire to float away, to rid the body of its illnesses and just wander, if only for a moment.
5. Agony Freak
You bet the song called ‘Agony Freak’ takes more than a few cues from nu metal, from scratch effects to a doomy, distorted bridge. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” Jordan said in press materials, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” Her chorus, for all its angst, is still pure ear candy, daring the titular villain to twist around her like it’s the only viable compromise.
6. Dead End
Jordan may not be bathing in her own agony anymore, but she remembers the days when she used to like they’re happening right now. “And the sound of your rain/ Brings down the perennial rain,” she sings on ‘Dead End’, sounding celestial even when she’s looking back on her teenage years. She used to park in a cul-de-sac and smoke with friends, the press release informs us, but Jordan’s lyric is naturally more potent: “You’re burned in my heart, old friend,” though the implied whatever you do burns, too. As the album’s lead single and centerpiece, it’s still the song that’s most reminiscent of producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s main band, Momma, and you wish its shoegazey sound trickled down to more of the songs.
7. Butterfly
The album’s possibly most nostalgic song is followed by the strongest proof of Snail Mail’s increasingly nuanced songwriting: taking a simple premise – the butterfly as a symbol of fragility – and threading it into a journey. Halfway through, the promise of anaesthesia fuels a punky bridge that crashes out into a daze of guitars, over which Jordan bemoans, “You want a trip?” It’s a far more pernicious glimpse of transcendence, of wanting to feel alive to mask the facts of your living.
8. Nowhere
Inspired by Laura Gilpin’s 1977 poem ‘The Two-Headed Calf’, this is another song about the clear sky making her – begging her, in this case – to slip away. She treats that liminality like a delicate secret: “Nobody can know/ The junction of sleeping and being in limbo,” she sings in an especially catchy chorus. Dreamily, of course, she lets us in on it.
9. Hell
There are moments on ‘Hell’ where Jordan’s voice is nearly unrecognizable, as she uses the verses of the song to showcase the expressive range it’s acquired since undergoing intensive speech therapy. That confidence bleeds into the lyrics, which betray no amount of self-pity in addressing estranged friendships. The hook even explodes into another gauzy bridge, as if projecting her words into the sky for the alienated others to see: “Are you wasted? Being on your own?”
10. Ricochet
There’s a point where the fantasy shatters and the romance is in the rubble, and this is it. All the maudlin sensibilities of Richochet don’t fully click until the title track and its stark specificity, precisely the moment when she sings: “You can’t stop now/ My little cliché/ ‘Til you’ve sold out/ All over LA.” The nothingness of the afterlife seems enticing then, its eroded time and infinite possibilities. The strings mirror the couple’s dynamic down on the earth, best captured by the single word that gives the album its name.
11. Reverie
The self-imposed isolation makes sense on the closer, where Jordan refreshingly balances her swooning resolution (“If loved is all we’ll ever be, then we’ll bask in our reverie”) with genuinely funny lines (“Older, now I’ve realized/ All my heroes are nothing more than socialites/ Fuck them too.”) Even if selling out all over LA means ending up at parties with “soulless zombies” where it’s all about the cash, Jordan sighs, there’s still no doubt they can make the night count. Besides, there’s always the afterparty.
