The night before Valentine’s Day and my second Saturn return, I had a dream about my ex. I was washing my hands in the bathroom when, suddenly, they appeared behind me, looking just as they did when we split three years ago. We met each other’s gaze in the mirror, but they left without saying a word. We then talked outside and embraced and it felt like one of the most tender hugs I’d ever received. Right as we started talking, I stirred awake and the first thing that came to mind was “Dead End,” the radiant lead single behind Lindsey Jordan’s third and latest record as Snail Mail, Ricochet. “Woke up thinking about you / Tried calling but I couldn’t get through,” Jordan sings on the opening hook, “Guess we got our own shit to do / But these days I don’t recognize you / Couldn’t ever be the same / To be loved is to be changed.” These lines almost felt too apt to my situation, particularly that last lyric, but that’s the magic of Jordan’s writing: piercing in its introspective texture and eloquently pithy in bringing it to the surface.
The emotional whiplash around these kinds of sudden and inevitable disruptions in our lives is the 26-year-old singer’s bread and butter; she nimbly navigated such terrain on her raw, diaristic 2018 debut Lush and its eclectic 2021 follow-up Valentine. Both albums played like emotionally devastating coming-of-age stories the way Jordan vividly captured in real time the strains of growing up. Lush used lo-fi, guitar-driven instrumentation and clear-eyed observations on loneliness and heartbreak to document Jordan’s journey as an angsty yet mature teen on the cusp of adulthood, while Valentine’s string-and-synth-forward production provided a striking soundtrack to the trials and tribulations of being a slightly more seasoned though still sensitive twenty-something. Now squarely in her mid-twenties, Jordan is entering yet another stage of intense personal growth, but one she seems content and confident in tackling.
Since 2021, Jordan has dealt with a series of ups and downs: moving from New York City to North Carolina, making her acting debut in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow, undergoing speech therapy after a vocal polyp removal, starting a relationship with Momma singer Etta Friedman. With these developments, Jordan seems to recognize how disorienting it is to exist in a world that moves so quickly and how hard but necessary it is to want to stay grounded, live intentionally, and be different from the person you once were. She channels the complexity of that beautifully on the riveting Ricochet, dialing back the clock to the dreamy alt-rock of the ‘90s and refracting the popular subgenres from that era—jangly pop, emo, grunge, and shoegaze—through a refreshingly current lens. There’s still a nerviness to her lyrics and a bitterness in her voice, but now that she’s older and wiser with greater post-surgery control over her vocals, Jordan is able to take better, more compassionate stock of the wreckage of her past using the wisdom and experience she’s accumulated over time.
The resulting record is a gorgeous, quietly stunning synthesis of sound and theme, brimming with the energy of a long-lost classic that’s been dug up, dusted off, and given a fresh polish (shoutout to the audio engineers for the crystal clarity of their mixing and mastering here). Its throwback presentation might seem humble and slight on the surface, but it shouldn’t detract from the focused insights and lovely imagery Jordan conjures. Throughout Ricochet’s 11 tracks, Jordan and her collaborator, Momma bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch, hone in on the themes gestured at on “Dead End”—the difficulty of moving on, the profound sadness in realizing some people aren’t meant to be in your life forever, and the unexpected freedom of starting over—with ease and aplomb.
As always, Jordan draws poetry from unexpected places: take the excellent opener “Tractor Beam,” which compares the pull of uncertainty to the light emitted from a UFO. The trip-hop-meets-The Sundays “My Maker” also employs a skybound metaphor (“I wanna fly a plane to heaven / Tarry at the airport bar”) to illustrate Jordan’s yearning to escape until she realizes that perhaps reconciliation is possible with the healing property of time’s passage. Jordan mines a lot of wonderfully warm stuff from that idea—not just lyrically but sonically, especially on the rich, orchestral strings of “Light on Our Feet,” the window-rolled-down summer melancholy of “Cruise,” and the rousing, crunchy guitar solo on “Butterfly.”
She does an equally deft job plumbing the not-as-warm parts of growing into herself, like on edgy highlight “Agony Freak,” where Jordan imagines a monster consuming all the old, icky, uncomfortable parts of her (“I tried to feed it but it just wants more / I can’t remember who I was before”). “Nowhere” also has a compelling bleakness to it, with Jordan envisioning herself as an animal wanting to find a place of comfort amid the turmoil around her. “Hell,” one of Ricochet’s best songs, finds Jordan confronting these conflicting forces of nature and free will even more, as she wrestles with her fear of death while acknowledging (or at least trying to acknowledge) her satisfaction with where she’s at. On the album’s closer and most contemporary track “Reverie,” Jordan occasionally tilts into cutesy, twee territory with her gentle, cooing line delivery, but the purity of the song’s cuddly, wholesome spirit elides most of it and, given the sharp-toothed musings that precede it, feels like an appropriately optimistic note to conclude on.
Dealing with change, even positive change, can be cumbersome and frustrating and lonely. It can be even more maddening when it happens beyond our own control or manifests suddenly in our subconscious. But, as Jordan underlines so well on Ricochet, the complicated beauty of becoming an adult is realizing that the more you break away from your past, the closer you get to who you are. There will always be new obstacles to face as there are new relationships to make, and Jordan translates that feeling into a work that’s both impressively exacting and genuinely stirring. [Matador]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
