What is there to mine, as a songwriter, when you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted? That’s been a central occupation of Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, since her 2020 album Silver Tongue. The struggle to settle into settling down comes to the forefront on her latest record, What an Enormous Room. She approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism, the mark of someone who knows who they can fall back on when times inevitably get tough. “The dread doesn’t pay any rent money,” she observes on “I got the fear.” “But as long as it doesn’t get ahold of my honey/Think I’ll be alright.”
As she’s entered her thirties, Scott has taken on a second creative life as the muse and subject of her partner, the painter Jenna Gribbon, who she married in 2022. Gribbon, whose portraits of Scott graced the covers of Silver Tongue and 2021’s Thirstier, often depicts her in scenes of domestic bliss mid-action: pulling on a robe, reading a book while slouched on a camping chair, flipping channels on the TV with no pants on. That same desire to find beauty in banality—a collection of mundane moments that build up to the larger picture—permeates the songs on What an Enormous Room. Between “months of Sundays” and morning coffee, Scott can perceive loneliness, grief, and anxiety all lurking in the wings, but none of them feel quite as vivid as “the way you hold me way too tight when we sleep.”
From the glitching marching-band rhythm on Sprinter’s “Cowboy Guilt” to the lopsided ’80s pop-rock of Thirstier’s “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head,” Scott has excelled at adding a jagged, oddball edge to familiar rock structures. At its best, this album pushes further into the weird. “Life as we don’t know it,” describing a near-death experience where Scott and her stepson almost drowned, features a descending keyboard line reminiscent of the B-52’s, or a “game over” sound effect—a darkly funny representation of getting pulled underwater. (The evocative flair extends to one of Scott’s best lines to date: “Each time I looked for God, I drank a wave down every time.”) Forceful lead single “Collect” is classic Torres, pairing fuzzed-out guitar with a steadfast beat that commands attention, while opener “Happy man’s shoes” adds groovy bass and sparkling effects that turn menace into triumph. “I do not accept your shame,” Scott sings, determined as ever, now setting her sights on comfort and self-love rather than revenge.
After self-producing Silver Tongue, on Thirstier Scott returned to working with longtime producer Rob Ellis, whose ties to PJ Harvey have always made him seem like a natural match for Scott’s confrontational art-rock. But she shuffles the deck once again, co-producing the new record with Sarah Jaffe at the recently built Stadium Heights Sound studios in North Carolina. What an Enormous Room meanders more than past Torres releases; on more than a few songs, Scott’s searing guitar and punchy vocals are buried in muddy production. The standouts make it all the more obvious that “Ugly mystery” could’ve gone even harder, or “Artificial limits” might not need to drag past six minutes. Scott’s unique touch remains audible in her songs—even the scuzz of “Artificial limits” has cool ornaments, such as a Dracula-worthy organ—but it would be nice if it stood out more.
Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge. “Ugly mystery” and “Forever home” dig into the realities of codependent relationships and an impoverished childhood, and the ways expressions of care get compromised in nonideal circumstances. Still, Scott is committed to hope. On “Jerk into joy,” an ode to the nonlinear cycles of grief after tragedy, Scott repeats the mantra, “What an enormous room/Look at all the dancing I could do,” over a relatively spare arrangement of guitar, piano, and airy drums that let the entire thing breathe. You can imagine her in the proverbial space, getting her bearings, trying out moves. She’s aware of her own trepidation, but rather than fall into the abyss, she’s still game for pushing forward.
