In 2021, after four albums and nearly a decade of releasing music as TORRES, Mackenzie Scott released her most impactful work to date, Thirstier. The LP was an ode to physical intimacy and matched the intensity of love’s head rush in its music. Across 10 songs, Scott never took her foot off the gas, injecting brashness and passion into every note on songs like “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” and “Hug From a Dinosaur.” It felt like Scott had fully leaned into the limitless nature of her music and we were enjoying the spoils of that trust fall. Nearly three years later, TORRES has returned curiously penned in. Her sixth album, What an enormous room, was co-produced by Scott herself and Sarah Jaffe at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina, the first album ever made there. An adventure in sentence case titling and slick, synth-laden rock, the album is a notable scaling down of its predecessor’s power. Inherent in its title is the idea that this album exists within a space that, while vast, is limited in its scope. Where Thirstier felt infinite, there’s now a ceiling.
What an enormous room’s production reaches the same high watermark as prior efforts like Three Futures and Silver Tongue, but struggles to land with the same impact. Choices made in the arrangements, though beautiful in their details, often do a disservice to the songwriting. In an attempt to make an album that’s more accessible, Scott and Jaffe delivered something that frequently feels washed out and defanged. “Wake to flowers,” for instance, beautifully draws Scott’s voice out with a hazy sustain, but its arrangement sinks her every word, muddling its message. “Life as we don’t know it” is similarly frustrating. While Scott’s guitar parts are interestingly done, squealing and pinched into canted angles, the mix dampens them. The vocal burying does the most damage to “Artificial limits.” Six minutes long and epic in scale, its lyrics—beautiful if read on paper—never land with the weight that they should because of the many layers of vocal affectation they carry. It also never reaches the climax it feels like it’s constantly building towards, offering only stray guitar wailing.
What an enormous room can often feel like a mixed bag, but it’s not without its bright spots. Several songs remind you that, while not everything here works, when Mackenzie Scott is at the height of her abilities, the results are hard to match. The only moment that comes close to repeating the unbridled zeal of her last album is “Collect.” Thirstier closed out with the riveting “Keep the Devil Out,” a song built around the eerie, repeated assertion that “Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there.” The lead single from What an enormous room picks up where “Devil” left off. The turgid guitars and icy piano stabs of “Collect” bathe Scott’s voice in an intimidating aura as she takes up the mantle of grim reaper. Here, she’s hammering home a warning to an undeserving target that their time is up, and she’s “here to collect.” It’s a propulsive song that lets Scott’s rich contralto hit with its full power and is an immediate standout within her catalog.
The opener, “Happy man’s shoes” is strange but confident, seeing her strut and sway while singing about starting over and rejecting shame. The glitchy drum machine and mechanical vocal delivery nod to the electronic experimentation of Scott’s own Three Futures. Like “Life as we don’t know it,” the guitars are playfully jagged, but work better here as filigree. Subtle and resplendent, “Jerk into joy” mentions the titular enormous room, a space where Scott lets her ebullient outlook run wild by dancing throughout it. A song about the awkward but necessary nature of looking on the bright side rather than sitting inside doom, its open and accepting tenor stands in a refreshing contrast to the befogged arrangements preceding it. This starkness also works to the benefit of the sparse album closer, “Songbird forever.” As though hovering, Scott’s voice becomes spectral, piano keys drifting by from somewhere out of frame. TORRES’ songs excel when they’re unrelenting and confident, no doubt, but songs like these make clear that gusto isn’t everything. The quiet moments can carry just as much resonance. When you’re hitting your ceiling, there’s nothing wrong with staying grounded.
Eric Bennett is a music critic in Philadelphia with bylines at Pitchfork, Post-Trash and The Alternative. They are also a co-host of Endless Scroll, a weekly podcast covering the intersection of music and internet culture. You can follow them on Twitter @violet_by_hole.
