Five years is a long time to wait for a record, especially when the last one ended on such a raw nerve. Snail Mail’s ‘Valentine’ arrived in 2021 with the kind of romantic desperation that felt almost too honest to look at directly. Before she could even tour it, Lindsey Jordan underwent surgery for vocal polyps, followed by months of speech therapy. Then came the long quiet: a move out of New York to Greensboro, North Carolina, and the slow work of figuring out what to write next. The indie world kept spinning without her, and a generation of younger artists filled the space she’d carved out. Now she’s back with ‘Ricochet,’ released March 27 on Matador Records, and the question worth asking isn’t whether it’s good. It is. The question is what kind of artist Jordan has become.
The short answer: a more patient one. Co-produced by Jordan herself alongside Momma bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch — whose contributions include string and trumpet arrangements, guitar, sampling, theremin, Optigan, slide guitar, organ, synthesizers, and drum programming, while Jordan handles her own string arrangements, guitar, Mellotron, and piano across the record — ‘Ricochet’ is built from the instrumentals outward. Jordan wrote the music first, then filled in the lyrics separately, and you can hear that architectural logic in the way songs move. “Tractor Beam,” the opener, uses alien abduction as a metaphor for dissociation — drawn from Greg Araki’s film ‘Mysterious Skin’ — a weird, specific image that somehow lands. The track was debuted on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon ahead of the album’s release and became the third of three pre-release singles, following “Dead End” and “My Maker.” “Dead End,” the lead single, has the grungy guitar directness of her earlier work but carries the weight of someone looking back at their teenage years from a survivable distance rather than the middle of them. “My Maker,” the second single, finds Jordan in a more meditative mood, musing on flights to heaven and airport tipples.
What’s changed most is the voice itself, and not just metaphorically. The adolescent rasp that made ‘Lush’ feel so immediate is gone, replaced by a wider range and a smoothed-out soprano with noticeably more control. On “Light On Our Feet,” Jordan moves into a higher register without the fragility that used to make you hold your breath. The surgery didn’t sand away her personality; it gave her room to actually inhabit it. And the lyrical territory has shifted to match. The heartbreak obsession of the first two records is mostly gone. In its place, Jordan is working through something bigger and harder to name — mortality, specifically. The title track finds a strange kind of peace in nihilism. “Hell,” which channels The Cranberries at their most plainspoken, has her admitting she’s scared to die. On “My Maker,” she imagines flying a plane to heaven only to tarry at the airport bar. These aren’t teenage diary entries. They’re the thoughts of someone who has been seriously ill and come out the other side genuinely curious about what any of it means.
The production leans hard into ’90s alt-rock textures — jangly guitars, bittersweet strings, a general commitment to the kind of sonic architecture that the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead built in the early part of that decade — filtered through Catherine Wheel shoegaze and Ivy power-pop sensibilities that keep it from feeling like cosplay. “Butterfly” is the record’s most dynamic moment, shifting from fast-paced guitar into a stripped, moody half-time passage that earns every second of its runtime. “Cruise” locks into a single lane and rides it until the brass arrives near the end and reframes the whole thing. Closer “Reverie” has a 1960s psychedelic tinge that hints at a sonic palette Jordan is only beginning to explore.
The critical reception has been warm but not unanimous — a Metacritic score of 71 reflects a genuine split between those who hear a maturing artist finding her footing and those who find the record a little too content to drift. That tension is real, and it’s worth sitting with. Jordan has traded the razor-wire immediacy of her early work for something more considered, and there will always be listeners who miss the version of her that wore the wound on the outside. But “Ricochet” as a title isn’t just a reference to bouncing back from hard years. It’s a description of how ideas and feelings move through a life — deflecting off surfaces, changing direction, arriving somewhere you didn’t expect. That’s exactly what this album does. And for a songwriter who started recording in her Maryland bedroom at sixteen, arriving at that kind of earned ambiguity at twenty-six is not a small thing.
