Premature Evaluation: Snail Mail Ricochet

Lindsey Jordan doesn’t seem very interested in keeping her feet on the ground these days. On Ricochet, her third album as Snail Mail, she optimistically welcomes getting beamed up into space. She fantasizes about bathing in the sky. She’s found the type of love that makes her feel like she’s living in her own Miyazakian castle suspended in the air. Sometimes, she wants to get to heaven so badly that simply puttering around Earth feels like she’s just passing time in hell.

But the sort of escapism Jordan presents on Ricochet, out this Friday, isn’t unwarranted — after all, she did endure a singer-songwriter’s worst nightmare. Right before she was supposed to tour Snail Mail’s previous record, 2021’s Valentine, she was diagnosed with vocal cord polyps. As a result, she was forced to postpone her tour so she could get surgery, spend an entire month on vocal rest, and start vocal therapy. The idea of an artist “finding their voice again” is more often than not a trite one, but for Jordan, who had to re-learn even how to speak, it was literal: The adolescent rasp of her 2018 indie hit debut Lush is obsolete, and she instead re-emerges with a wider range and a smoothed-out soprano. At times, she sounds unrecognizable. Ricochet doesn't try to act as Jordan's grand reintroduction, but it does present different iteration of Snail Mail, one it seems even Jordan herself might still be getting used to.

Ricochet kicks off with “Tractor Beam,” a highlight that spotlights the full dexterity of Jordan’s newly-minted pipes: “You can cast my letters to the sea/ But you can’t find anyone else like me,” she croons in the song’s sweeping final moments with palpable aplomb. It's a strong opener, but a few songs and a few “yeah-yeah”s and “na-na-na”s later, you get the sense that maybe Jordan hasn’t fully detached the training wheels. “It feels random as fuck,” she’s even said of her new voice, not necessarily signifying a lack of confidence but perhaps suggesting she’s still getting familiar with a more refined version of herself.

As Jordan tells it, she’s particular about location when it comes to songwriting. She wrote Lush in her childhood bedroom in Baltimore, and when it came time to follow it up with Valentine, she found she couldn’t make any progress in her New York apartment, which sacrificed some privacy by sheer nature. After completing the Valentine tour, Jordan made yet another major life change and bought a “cheap,” “peaceful” house outside of Greensboro, a North Carolina city with which she’d fallen in love while playing shows across the US. Ricochet indirectly hints at this created distance, and alludes to some feelings widely shared among those who’ve spent enough time schmoozing around Manhattan: “The planet looks so small,” she observes on the mellow closer “Reverie.” “Older, now I’ve realized/ All my heroes are nothing more than socialites/ Fuck them, too.”

And so when the dust of her medical tribulations and interstate move settled, Jordan got to work again. In a first for Snail Mail — whose earlier career highlights set the bar superlatively high for gut-punching pop-rock hooks — she wrote all of the instrumentals and melodies of Ricochet before then filling in the lyrics all in one go. She took the demos to producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch of Brooklyn rockers Momma, and the end result is Snail Mail's most polished-sounding record yet. Its front half is light, dreamy, and bucolic, leaning into Jordan's pop influences and steeped in grandiose strings informed by Born To Die. It works at times, and works less well at others: Pseudo-ballads like the smitten "Light On Our Feet" and the utopian "Cruise" make for perfectly pleasant passive listening, but they don't have quite the same the verve Jordan later compensates for on the edgier album highlights like "Agony Freak" and "Hell."

Where Lush and Valentine were pieced together from heat-of-the-moment confessionals, Ricochet most often ruminates on life and death — an especially pertinent topic if you, like Jordan, have spent nearly a decade of your 26 years of life as a rock star. Now Jordan is less curious in divulging matters of the heart, and Ricochet tends to zoom outward: "Another year gone by/ What if nothing matters?/ Waitin’ round to die/ To see what happens after," she wonders over the uptempo jangle of "My Maker." Thematically, Jordan took a lot of inspiration from Charlie Kaufman's psychodrama Synecdoche, New York and Laura Gilpin's poem The Two-Headed Calf, and the album is occasionally laced with recurring themes of alienation, self-destruction, and doubting one's own self-worth. But maybe Ricochet's most salient pitfall is that, across the album, these upstanding topics feel too restrained and nascent.

There are solid songs on Ricochet, and the more time I spend with them, the more I come to sympathize with Jordan's detachment; it's true that wearing your heart plastered on your sleeve through some of the most formative years of your life becomes draining. But even Jordan has admitted to some self-imposed suppression on Ricochet: "I think I can be brave in some ways, but I really worry about affecting other people," she's said of her aversion to writing too explicitly about real can-of-worms topics like heartbreak, sex, and family dynamics. "I don’t even want to talk about where my insecurities lie with vulnerable stuff, because it seems like a lot of it just becomes fodder for people to be like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s wrong with her?’”

With that in mind, I don't doubt that Jordan can make another more forthright and candid album in the future. On Ricochet's pop-forward gem of a closer, "Reverie," she laments about music industry woes — "Met a guy so far up his own ass/ I gotta laugh to keep from crying" — before coming to the realization that the big-headed hotshots have "nothing over you and I." Jordan has, numerous times over, proven herself to be a sharp songwriter. Judging by Ricochet, however, that songwriting is at its sharpest with two feet firmly planted on the ground.

Ricochet is out 3/27 via Matador.