Fiona Apple spent five years building “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” inside her Venice Beach house before a pandemic arrived to give it a story. That story, the perfect quarantine album, isolation rendered as art, confinement made suddenly universal, is not wrong. But it has a way of making the record feel like an accident of timing, when the truth is almost the opposite. This is one of the most deliberately constructed albums of the last decade, assembled with a specific structural logic that has everything to do with rhythm.
The album was recorded from 2015 to 2020, largely at Apple’s home in Venice Beach, produced and performed by Apple alongside drummer Amy Aileen Wood, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and guitarist Davíd Garza. Those four credits tell you something, but the individual instrument lists tell you more. Apple played piano, electronic drums, Mellotron, and something listed simply as “metal butterfly.” Steinberg played bass, electric autoharp, a twelve-string acoustic, slide guitar, and harp. Garza contributed vibraphone, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, and organ across different tracks. The word “objects” keeps appearing in the credits for the closer, “On I Go,” and that’s the whole point. Background vocals across the record came from Amber Maggart (Apple’s sister), Winifred Lucky, and Cara Delevingne, a detail the pandemic narrative tends to swallow entirely.
Apple has described the process as building “percussion orchestras,” and Garza put it plainly: “She wanted to start from the ground.” The four of them wrote and rehearsed in Apple’s home, using homemade percussive objects and chanting as they moved through the house. GarageBand was used for much of the recording, and Apple credited the album’s unedited vocals and long takes partly to her inexperience with the software. That inexperience turns out to be a feature. The vocals on “Drumset” have the quality of something caught rather than constructed. The song grew out of a specific incident: Wood had removed her drums from Apple’s house to play a gig, and Apple, not knowing this, thought she had quit the project. The feeling that came from that misunderstanding became the song.
The percussion on this record is worth sitting with carefully, because it is doing something unusual. On “Newspaper,” the rhythms are built partly from found objects, barking dogs audible in the background, the domestic world bleeding into the arrangement without apology. The title track layers Apple’s voice over what sounds like kitchen implements being struck in sequence, and the effect is less chaotic than it reads on paper. An orchestra has internal logic, hierarchy, parts that answer each other. The clattering on “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is not random noise; it has a pulse, and that pulse is what keeps the record from collapsing under its own strangeness. Found objects used in the sessions included oil cans, wooden blocks, bells, a metal butterfly, and, notably, the bones of Apple’s deceased dog Janet. That last detail is either the most eccentric production credit in recent memory or a quietly moving one, depending on your angle. Probably both.
Apple has attributed the album’s prominent use of percussion to a childhood habit, developed as part of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which she would always walk rhythmically to a strict tempo. That habit became the organizing principle of a body of work five years in the making. The opening track, “I Want You to Love Me,” sets this up immediately: a piano figure that keeps circling back, a rhythm that feels both compulsive and controlled. By the time the record reaches “Relay” and “Cosmonauts,” the percussion has become something close to architecture.
The pandemic framing also tends to flatten the album’s emotional register, which is considerably wider than “isolation.” “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” has been noted as Apple’s most humorous record, which surprises people who come in expecting the unrelenting gravity of “Tidal” or “The Idler Wheel.” “Ladies” is a song about women’s solidarity taken about as far as it can go: Apple forgives and befriends the woman who cheated with her man, addressing her directly, with something that lands closer to affection than accusation. “Shameika,” the album’s lead single, which peaked at number 19 on the Billboard Adult Alternative Songs chart and won Best Rock Performance at the 63rd Grammy Awards, is a song about a middle school memory that functions as a piece of self-archaeology, tracing the origins of Apple’s own stubbornness back to a girl who told her she had potential. These are songs about the specific texture of a life examined without flinching.
The album was mixed by Tchad Blake on the majority of tracks, with Dave Way and John Would handling the remainder, and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Released on April 17, 2020, it received a perfect 10 from Pitchfork and debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 while hitting number one on the Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums, and Top Album Sales charts. The album itself won Best Alternative Music Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards, alongside “Shameika’s” Best Rock Performance win. Those numbers matter less than this: the album’s reputation has calcified around a moment in time, when its actual achievement is architectural. Apple and Wood and Steinberg and Garza built a record where the house itself became an instrument, where a rhythm-obsessed woman’s childhood habit of walking to a strict tempo became the organizing principle of everything that followed. The pandemic gave the album an audience. The audience deserves to know what they’re actually hearing.
