Fiona Apple's New Album Roars With the Mess of Life
So often, when critics write about Fiona Apple, they write about the depth of her pain—the rawness of her hurt, the breadth of her despair. Since her 1996 debut, Tidal, a startling account of sexual trauma and broken hearts that dropped when she was just a teen, Apple’s willingness to face the things that torment her has always been destabilizing. It has shaped her mighty, if small, catalog, from “Get Him Back,” off 2005’s Extraordinary Machineto “Paper Bag,” off 1999’s When the Pawn… to “Werewolf,” off 2012’s The Idler Wheel. It has also shaped the public’s chosen narrative for the singer. She has been their tortured artist; their haunted ingenue. But listening to her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, which drops today, the moments that shock most are its triumphant peaks. It roars with the mess of womanhood, and across its 13 brazen, occasionally brash tracks its dares that you not look away.
This crescendo arrives early on the collection, which itself arrives after another seven-year hiatus. (Since 1999, Apple’s albums have all been works of six- or seven-year timespans.) The spastic second track, “Shameka”—a cacophony of barroom piano lines, crashing cymbals, production distortions, and Apple’s shout-singing—finds power in the memory of a middle school tough girl once telling the singer she “had potential.” It’s followed immediately by the percussive title track, a rallying cry for outsiders everywhere. Lined with Cara Delavigne’s meowing (seriously) and dogs barking, one particular vocal aside, a promise just for herself, holds weight: “I need to run up that hill,” she says. “I will, I will.”
On the almost sing-songy standout “Under the Table,” which follows, Apple tells off a man who thinks he can censor her. “Kick me under the table all you want,” she remarks, at first playful and later resolute, “I won’t shut up.” By the bridge, you’ve all but joined in her shouting: “I would beg to disagree/but begging disagrees with me!” she hollers over an uneven drum line, all fury and feeling. It is the sort of cathartic release women have fantasized about for millions of years.
As it always has, Apple’s lyrical gaze plumbs the darkest of her internal corners. A profound willingness to share—to cull the grittiest of memories and the knottiest of emotions—has long set her work apart from her peers. “If you’re intimate with my music,” she told Vulture in 2019, “you’re intimate with me and I’m intimate with you. I feel like you’re my friend.” Recently, in a profile with the New Yorker, Apple admitted that she knew a lyric that she’d improvised had to stay “because it was embarrassing.”
That bravery has paved the way for young, bare-it-all creatives like Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, and Alessia Cara in recent years, but, even as hyper-confessionalism has become the norm, there remains a radicalness to Apple’s missives that can’t be emulated. Her outright refusal to rationalize her reactions, instead letting their ugly glory just be, defies logic. (At the very least, it stands counter to common impulse.) On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, this is best seen as she chronicles the many ways she relates to women—from empathy to envy; rage to obsession.
On the foreboding “Newspaper,” she’s infatuated with an abusive ex’s new love. “When I learned what he did, I felt close to you,” she admits, her voice straining over the beat. “In my own way, I fell in love with you/But he’s made me a ghost to you.” The theatrical “Ladies” sees her consider “the revolving door which keeps turning out more good women like you/Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” And “The Drumset Is Gone” belies its recounting of rejection—written in the wake of a fight with her band which saw drummer Amy Aileen Wood take her kit out of the studio—with a playful rock arrangement.
Littered with tantalizing references to old flames, Apple’s albums have long taunted tabloid writers and gossip hounds. And for those who crave it, they need not dig too hard on Fetch the Bolt Cutters to find such fare. Aside from the new love for her former lover on “Newspaper,” on the remarkable “For Her,” which sees her layer her own voice until it sounds like a gospel choir, Apple disparages wasting her “formative years” with a coke-riddled Hollywood type. “Maybe she just got tired of watching him/sniff white off a starlet’s breast,” she sings. “Treating his wife like less than a guest/Making his girl clean up his mess.” On the soulful “Rack of His” she makes fun of an ex’s showy guitar collection, “outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” “They don’t know what they are in for and they don’t care,” she sings, “but I do.”
There’s a frenzy to the production of each that, on first listen, feels jarring, even unwelcoming. From out there tempo changes to screeching, occasionally bizarre effects and overlays, the melodies can be hard to find at times. But Fetch the Bolt Cutters rewards an open mind, and once you find their grooves, their talons latch on and sink in, gripping you at bone level. Giving into the madness, embracing the yawps, screeches, screams and cursing, it turns out, is the reward. It may not be perfect but it’s pure. Welcome to unadulterated rock catharsis.
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