It’s an odd quirk of British culture that the country’s defining pop rebels often wind up part of the intellectual establishment. Instead of being sent to the glue factory, ex-punks and erstwhile Britpoppers find themselves on the airwaves of BBC 6 Music and the shelves of mainstream bookshops; they write broadsheet newspaper columns and compose serious film scores. This is exactly what Tracey Thorn has been up to in the eight years since the former Marine Girl and Everything But the Girl singer released her third solo album. She’s published two excellent memoirs, guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s “Today Show,” written a New Statesman column, done the music for Carol Morley’s The Falling, released a Christmas album, and reigns as a popular Twitter voice. To Brits, there is nothing surprising about this. In the best possible way, what makes no sense is that Thorn should release one of the defining albums of her 38-year-long career right now.
Your first thought on hearing Record should be: Why has it taken so long for Thorn to embrace the right and true path of disco maven? At 55, Thorn’s voice—the spiritual forebear to the xx’s Romy Madley Croft—has deepened into a brogue that suggests diva grandeur but retains its inherent skepticism, luring you to the dancefloor while raising an eyebrow at your moves. Following the breakout success of Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing,” Everything But the Girl switched jazzy indie pop for jungle and drum ‘n’ bass on their final two albums, to middling effect: The songwriting didn’t change, just the window dressing. On Record, Thorn and co-producer Ewan Pearson build acid basslines and monochrome disco whirl around Thorn’s august voice, giving her center stage to steer the drama and euphoria of what she’s called nine “feminist bangers.”
Thorn’s latter-day solo material has often confronted topics that don’t come up a lot in pop: getting back into dating after divorce, entering menopause as your teenage kids are hitting puberty, the fear of familiar bodies growing boring—some character studies (Thorn remains married to EBTG’s Ben Watt), others not. But she’s never sung about them with so much humor, action, and revelation as she does here. On 2007’s Out of the Woods and 2010’s Love and Its Opposite these were themes rather than stories; worrying signs of diminishment rather than new opportunities. Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.
Record is loosely structured like a fever dream about how expectations surrounding femininity—and what it means to embrace or reject them—shape a life. It starts with Thorn staring down the crossroads of middle age in a song of existential bafflement set, appropriately, to a caper that sounds like early New Order. “Here I go again,” she sighs on “Queen,” sanguine as she contemplates what might have been and wonders which is more real—her, or the fantasy? “I’m on fire/A head full of desire/This is me and someone else entirely,” she marvels, invoking Springsteen for the first time on an album that often borrows his trademark triumphalism to recast a woman’s life as a hero’s journey. (A moment, too, for Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums, playing racing hi-hats so light and dazzling they seem sampled from sea sparkle.)
Thorn looks to her past to figure out how to handle her future: the liberation of being “too tall, all wrong” for boys; the cad who broke her heart but not before teaching her the three chords that gave her a future; anxious first fumblings, contraception, babies, empty nests, and inheritance. Always defiant, she deftly traces these milestones and the changing heart that comes alongside them. “I didn’t want my babies,” she sings on “Babies,” a restrained reproductive anthem with more Boss flair, “until I wanted babies/And when I wanted babies/Nothing else would do but babies/Babies, babies.” The kids grow up and her role changes again. “This won’t make sense to you now,” she sings to her teenage charges on tender dream-pop dirge “Go”: “To wave you out the door/It’s what my love was for/And I know you have to go.” While empathetic, Thorn is also a master of the perfect, barbed couplet that makes you punch the air, cutting her economic storytelling with shots of acid. “Though we kissed and kissed and kissed/You were nothing but a catalyst,” she sings to three-chords boy on “Guitar,” a fizzing new-wave jam that’s wholly befitting of its subject matter.
Almost every song is worthy of that teenage revelation. Wielding a sparse, tarnished palette, Pearson and Thorn build compact and stylish pop songs that build to heart-racing emotional release, though Record’s highlight is its most ambitious song: “Sister,” an eight-and-a-half-minute breakdown built around spindly funk, shattered-glass percussion, austere cowbell, and Thorn’s flinty message of female solidarity. “I am my mother now/I am my sister/And I fight like a girl,” she sings, the effect as seductive as it is menacing. The only track that feels out of place is “Face,” a character study of a woman obsessing over her ex’s Facebook and his new partner that’s brilliantly observed—and crystallized in dubby purgatory—but a bitter outlier to her valiant scheme.
Over the course of Record, Thorn looks squarely at society’s ordained roles for women—mother, lover, caregiver—as a way of figuring out what happens when those expectations have largely been fulfilled. What do freedom and purpose look like? By way of an answer, Thorn ends Record with “Dancefloor,” which flips the fantasy she explored in “Queen” (and sounds deliciously like Stuart Price-era Pet Shop Boys bashing helmets with Daft Punk). When she properly considers it, the idea of running away for a new life is really quite knackering: “Think of what you’d have to pack/If you left and planned on never coming back,” she sings, a line of deadpan despair given weight by her austere tone. “Oh, but where I’d like to be/Is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me,” she sings, the tone shifting from anxiety to release. Real escape, it turns out, is much more prosaic. But as Thorn proves on a glorious record, no less transcendent.
