FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Lavine c/o Pitch Perfect
Part Sixty-Two: TORRES
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APOLOGIES if I jump back and forth a bit…
PHOTO CREDIT: Bella Newman
but, as I am including TORRES (Mackenzie Ruth Scott) in this Modern Heroines feature, there is a lot to cover. The Florida-born artist is one of my favourites of the moment and, in my view, she is going to go on to inspire so many others. I will bring things up to date with her new album, Thirstier (released on 30th July). I am going to source a review of that album. Before then, there are some interviews that are worth quoting. Her previous album, last year’s Silver Tongue, is where I discovered TORRES. It was the first album after a rather unfortunate and disappointing split with the 4AD label (she released Silver Tongue through Merge). In this interview with FADER, the move to a new label is mentioned. Whilst the label split was quite depressing, Silver Tongue is a warm and redemptive album:
“Silver Tongue, Scott’s fourth album, due out on January 31, is her first for the legendary North Carolina-based label Merge and first since a disappointing split from 4AD in the wake of Three Futures, the latter of which had her seriously contemplating a life away from music. “I wondered if I was just fooling myself about being able to actually have a career in this terrible industry,” she says. “My initial reaction was shock, fear of the unknown. Rejection is hard for anyone.”
When Scott did start writing again, she didn’t write about the depression and anxiety she felt in those first few weeks after the split, living alone in Manhattan with only her cat for company. Instead, Silver Tongue is a collection of love songs — still pockmarked by anger and jealousy at points and coiled around the wide-eyed mysticism she explored last time out, but easily her most welcoming album yet.
Scott is in love with her girlfriend, the artist Jenna Gribbon; she painted the cover of Silver Tongue, a radiant portrait of Scott with her hand inviting the listener in. And she’s now comfortable singing about being in love with a woman. From the start, Scott was saddled with the “confessional” tag that most young women with guitars have to lug around forever, but she was hardly an open book on her self-titled debut from 2013, instead tip-toeing around romantic attraction. Scott claims she doesn’t listen to any of her albums after they’re released, but she remembers the ash-light “Don’t Run Away, Emilie” — in which she sang, “I need you 'cause you see me / Somehow” — as a moment in which she walked right up to her point without fully expressing it.
“I thought that I was being really revealing, [but it] could be about anything now as far as I'm concerned,” she says. “I'm sure that it doesn’t sound like a love song to anyone, but it was about someone that I was in love with, and at the time that I wrote that my family didn't even know that I loved women. It was about protecting my family and maybe protecting myself from the world, too[...] There was fear involved — of not wanting to reveal exactly who I was, because I wanted to be accepted”.
I love Thirstier and feel that is might be her strongest album. Silver Tongue could have been a bit of a mess and an album that brimmed with anger and dissociation. Whilst there is some anger and anxiety, one gets so much warmth and passion from the album. In this MTV interview, TORRES discusses the transition from 2017’s Three Futures and (a then-new) Silver Tongue:
“These songs are very much me rather than the sort of characters I was playing on [Three Futures]," she says. She occupies herself, not fictionalized stand-ins, such as the "ass man" narrating "Righteous Woman" and the seemingly murderous titular character of the ferocious, demonic "Helen in the Woods." As such, she drifts toward contentment instead of melodrama — even though her current partner isn't the only person under the lens.
"The record is about two different people, one of them being [Jenna]," she begins before succinctly concluding, "and then one other person." In neither naming this person nor saying more about them, she hurls shade at a former lover without identifying how that relationship fell apart. She likewise keeps this figure at a distance throughout Silver Tongue, forgoing the rage she's long conjured in her music. Scott's calmer, more level-headed approach can be chalked up to a new lyrical approach: processing events as they happened rather than after.
"When something has already happened, you have the luxury of saying whatever you want about it," Scott says. "We manipulate the narrative of things from the past to make them be what we wish they were. You can't do that with a relationship that you're in the middle of. You can't trick yourself."
Scott's unflinching honesty with herself dominates the back-to-back Silver Tongue highlights "Records of Your Tenderness" and "Two of Everything." The former depicts Scott first falling for Gribbon: "I can't get one word in front of the other... I can't believe you're coming over," she beckons over alien synth transmissions and heartbeat kicks. Her surprise is reasonable, as she wrote penultimate track "Gracious Day" to win Gribbon back after they nearly broke up.
Likewise, on "Two of Everything," a song about that unspoken other, when Scott sings, "What was it that made her think / She could have two of everything? / One of you and one of me?" over astral guitars and sauntering snares, she's not angry that she's caught in an open relationship, and she's not scorning her ex. She's digging through the wreckage without squinting, trying to discern why this person wanted to forgo monogamy.
"That song was almost called 'Polyagony,'" she quips. "It was really hard for me to write, but it needed to be written." The mental clarity she achieved while writing it empowered her, just as the song's lyrics might embolden listeners: "I decided to write exactly how I wanted to without [changing] things to be more universal," she says, noting that this method "is something I haven't done in the past."
Scott candidly centered her own artistic desires rather than those of others — made-up characters, fans, and music-industry pressures, the last of which dissipated after the 4AD controversy. "I think that that's best left where it sits," she says. Still, this twist of fate manifested in another crucial way: Silver Tongue is the first self-produced Torres record. With nobody standing between her ideas and her instruments, Scott had no trouble putting together her most unfiltered art to date.
"I wanted to do things exactly in the order I wanted and try all my weird ideas without having to bounce them off somebody else. ... I had the language and technical capabilities, and I felt confident," she says. That she self-produced her most lyrically sincere record is no coincidence: "I'm really able to own the way that I feel and where I am in my life." In other words, hiring a producer as "translator," as she says, isn't necessary for someone who's finally achieved an ongoing, unsparingly upfront internal dialogue with herself”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Shawn Brackbill
I am going to wrap up my Silver Tongue bits in a second. Am focusing on this album as a lot of the most-recent press and interviews is from this year. Go and get TORRES’ music on vinyl and appreciate a truly magnificent artist. I’ll bring in one more interview, together with a review for Silver Tongue. Consequence chatted with TORRES last year. There was a definite sense of defeatism and struggle in TORRES’ heart prior to making Silver Tongue:
“Speaking over the phone, she isn’t talking about writing her forthcoming fourth record, Silver Tongue. Nor producing on her own for the first time. Nor even the label drama that happened between 2017’s Three Futures and this latest effort. No, Scott is talking about having to take a bartending job after sustaining herself with her music career ever since releasing her self-titled debut seven years ago.
A number of factors forced her back into the grind in order to “pay rent.” Sure, losing her label after just one record was discouraging, but so were the slowing ticket sales to her concerts and the general hardships of earning a living as a musician in the Streaming Era. There was a time when it was enough to make her consider, at least for a short while, leaving music permanently. It’s something many — even most — artists surely confront at some point. Thankfully, for Scott, it passed “really quickly.”
“I realized I just can’t really do anything else as well,” she explains. Still, the struggle remains real. “I don’t really know that it’s sustainable at this point to make a living playing music and just that. I’ve got to have more hands in more cookie jars. Ideally that would be within the umbrella that we consider music or entertainment and writing, performing. Music doesn’t really pay so much right now.”
Regardless of your opinion on the scene in general or Torres’ music in particular, that sort of grit is commendable. Knowing that things could go belly up at any moment only to go ahead as an artist anyway takes rare determination. Or as Scott herself puts it, perhaps it’s just being “dense and unrealistic.” Still, there’s nothing wrong with a little self-motivating naivete, and her faith in Torres is what has kept her producing such captivating art from the very start.
It takes more than sheer force of will to keep a career like this going, though it certainly doesn’t help when the industry seems to keep hitting the reset button on your trajectory. Scott has an equable conviction in her own work, and even a first listen to Silver Tongue will assure it’s not a meritless belief. She calls the LP “the most Torres-sounding record” she’s made yet, confident enough in the results that she quit her service job just a few weeks ago. Should she one day have to head back behind the bar, at least she’ll be comfortable in the knowledge that she’s delivered the finest collection of songs in her career. That in and of itself is significant and a validation of her unrelenting trust in her art”.
I am coming to Thirstier soon. Before that, PASTE wrote a really great and detailed review for Silver Tongue. It is worth sourcing and showing off:
“The album chronicles the narrative arc of a relationship, from the thrill and terror of chasing a suddenly obtainable crush (“Good Scare,” “Last Forest”), to the ensuing entanglement (“Records of Your Tenderness”), jealousy (“Two of Everything”) and post-breakup spiraling (“Good Grief”). In this regard, Silver Tongue is like a synth-pop cousin of Liz Phair’s similarly sequenced Whip-Smart, except that TORRES’ romantic vignettes are unmistakably queer. On “Two of Everything,” with its M83-worthy layers of overcast synths, an embittered Scott questions her ex-girlfriend’s new lover: “To the one sharing my lover’s bed / Do you hold her when she sleeps? / Does she also call you Baby?”
It’s a stark emotional centerpiece for the record, in part because Scott’s approach is imbued with far more empathy than, say, CeeLo Green’s “Fuck You.” (“I’m going to be the biggest thorn in your side,” she warns the object of her envy, yet she has the decency to feel bad about it in the next line.) The female pronouns make clear that she is not longing for a man. As the artist told an NPR interviewer, “I want people to understand that women can burn for each other.”
TORRES’ previous albums have addressed relationships plenty, but here she probes the subject—and her own anxieties—with surgical precision. Silver Tongue is full of keen one-liners and strange little insights into the darker side of desire and insecurity. “Good Scare,” which uses a flood of thumping ’80s drums to inject cinematic drama into Scott’s desires, captures the disorienting fluctuations in confidence that accompany a love interest’s possible reciprocation: “When you said you couldn’t swing it / You gave me a good scare for a minute there.” And “Dressing America” offers this poetic illustration of infatuation, set to an uneasy melding of synth sheen and pedal steel: “I tend to sleep with my boots on / Should I need to gallop over dark water to you.”
Musically, Silver Tongue feels far removed from TORRES’s early albums, yet its best track, “Good Grief,” offers a sleek update on the indie-rock crunch of 2015’s Sprinter. The song finds Scott brooding after the break-up, alone at the bar where she met her ex. The song’s chorus satirizes cultural fetishization of depression (“Good grief, baby / There’s no such thing”), while its climax deploys fuzzy power chords and a mangled guitar hook in the album’s one real rock-out moment.
That climax makes the spare vulnerability of “A Few Blue Flowers” and “Gracious Day” all the more striking. The latter hints at a reconciliation, with acoustic arpeggios undergirding a promise to “write you only love songs.” In appropriately meta fashion, this is one of TORRES’s purest love songs, and Silver Tongue’s biggest misstep is not letting such a strong closer end the album. “Silver Tongue,” the actual closer, feels tacked on: It’s the rare moment when the artist’s synth-pop production feels overly busy, overpowering the song and muffling the impact”.
Go and pre-order this cool vinyl of Thirstier. It is an album that, I think, ranks alongside the finest of the year so far. Here is what Rough Trade say about an exceptional work:
“Torres’ fifth album Thirstier pumps the miraculous into the mundane. It is in open revolt against the gray drag of time, a searing and life-affirming eruption of an album that wonders what could happen if we found a way to make our fantasies inexhaustible. What if we got whatever we wanted and still wanted it, endlessly, with no threat of boredom and no danger of depletion? What could we become if we let ourselves grow incandescent with eternally renewing desire?
Recorded in the fall of 2020 at Middle Farm Studios in Devon, UK, Thirstier marks a turn towards a bigger, more bombastic sound for Torres. The anxious hush that fell over much of Scott’s previous music gets turned inside-out in songs tailored for post-plague celebration. Scott co-produced the album with Rob Ellis and Peter Miles, drawing on her experience self-producing the acclaimed 2020 LP Silver Tongue to push her music onto an even broader scale. Guitar-driven walls of sound, reminiscent of producer Butch Vig’s work with Garbage and Nirvana, surge and dissipate like surf in high winds, carrying Scott’s commanding voice to the fore.
From the sparkling country romp of “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” to the sour grunge bite of “Keep the Devil Out” and the unabashed, overflowing devotion of the album’s title track, Thirstier clasps together love songs from all angles. Romantic love, platonic love, familial love, self-love, and freeing spiritual love all commingle, all feeding one another and vaulting toward the horizon”.
The reviews for Thirstier have been largely positive. In their review, this is what NME had to say about one of TORRES’ most remarkable releases:
“Blending woozy waves of electronic with powerful, theatrical vocals, ‘Don’t Go Puttin’ Wishes In My Head’ combines ‘Silver Tongue’s thoughtful lyrical content (“If we’re calling off the funеral, then I’m calling for a hitching,” she booms over squalling guitars) with weightier sonics. Channeling the rawness of garage rock, ‘Hug From A Dinosaur’ is a pleasingly surreal song about the day-to-day joy of bringing her girlfriend lunch so that she can keep painting without taking a break.
Psychedelic imagery abounds, too: ‘Constant Tomorrowland’ is all twangling Dirty Projectors-style chamber pop, flowing rivers and magical forests, and is dedicated to the astrological “age of Aquarius” and its expansion of consciousness. Taking cues from dance music, ‘Kiss the Corners’ is hypnotically dreamy. But elsewhere, Torres crashes back down to earth again with a meaningful thud. “I am diabolically truthful,” she sings on ‘Big Leap’, “And I live beyond illusion”.
Torres has previously explored love in a cinematic fashion, but ‘Thirstier’ finds her more concerned with the everyday magic that comes afterwards, when the everyday rituals and shared memories set in. It’s admittedly not the most cohesive album, infatuated with various experimental threads, but it’s also hard to fault this restlessness album, which is punchy and gutsy enough to hold up Torres’ constantly intriguing ideas”.
I shall leave it there. I am a big fan of TORRES. Since her debut album of 2013 (TORRES), she has delivered such incredible music. Go and dig out her stuff if you like what you hear and read in this feature (I have put together a playlist of her tracks at the very end). The remarkable, original and amazing TORRES is definitely someone…
TO look up to.