Five years after her last release, Snail Mail returns with Ricochet via Matador Records. Recorded partly in North Carolina at the studio of R.E.M producer Mitch Easter and partly in Brooklyn, Lindsey Jordan collaborated with Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch to put together her most daring record to date.
Sonically, Ricochet leans into the hallmarks that have defined Snail Mail’s appeal, big immersive guitars and Jordan’s unmistakable vocal, while expanding them into something more textured and deliberate. There’s a clear progression here: the arrangements feel fuller, more considered, with the addition of strings elevating tracks like “Light On Our Feet” into something genuinely luminous. It’s an album that sounds assured, even as its themes wrestle with instability.
Opening track “Tractor Beam” sets the tone early, its bright, chiming guitars giving way to something more unsettled beneath the surface. As it builds, strings begin to swell around Jordan’s vocal, carrying it toward a powerful close, particularly on the cutting line “you can’t find anyone else like me, and a sour taste is all I’ll be, in a bitter part of your memory”.
The second track and single, “My Maker”, leans further into the record’s existential thread, with Jordan’s US twang sitting over a focal acoustic guitar as strings and distant electric lines gently twinkle around it. “I wanna fly a plane to heaven” becomes one of the song’s defining images, a line that captures Jordan’s curiosity about what lies beyond and further explores the album’s wider fascination with mortality.
At its core, Ricochet is preoccupied with time, how it moves, what it takes, and what it leaves behind. Jordan returns to ideas of mortality and the gradual way people and moments slip out of reach. That tension between holding on and letting go runs throughout the album, felt in the melancholic pull of the melodies, but also in flashes of euphoria that break through and briefly lift the weight of it all.
There is a strong sense of nostalgia running throughout, but it comes into particularly sharp focus on “Dead End”. Here, Jordan mourns the loss of a friendship with a quiet, cutting clarity, reflecting a broader acceptance that you do not get to keep everyone. A driving 90s-style riff and punchy drums transport you straight to that image of being “parked at the dead end”, capturing the familiar stillness of late nights spent with someone who may no longer be in your life. It is a simple but powerful scene, where the poignancy is heightened by the line, “I hope you get the life you want.”
By the time we reach “Reverie”, the closing track, there is a noticeable shift in tone. More of a ballad, it begins in a stripped-back space before gradually opening into a warm, sing-along moment that feels quietly optimistic. There is humour in the reflection too, Jordan laughing off past situations with the line “met a guy so far up his own ass, gotta laugh”, before landing on the far more sincere “I could do it all the time with you” and “life is so worth living now”. It provides a gentle and optimistic end to an album that showcases a clear sense of maturity, both musically and personally.
Vocally, this is Jordan’s most developed performance to date. There is greater control and patience in her delivery, along with a clear confidence in the variation she brings across the record, at times really flourishing, with “Hell” being a prime example. It is not just the vocals that feel more mature and refined. The production and composition operate on a broader scale throughout, with the recurring use of strings adding depth and texture, while the horns that appear on “Cruise” underline a new sense of ambition and confidence in the record’s overall sound.
Ultimately, Ricochet feels like a different kind of coming of age, one that reflects a more complicated process of understanding your place in the world. It recognises how easy it is to become consumed by your own experiences, while gently pulling back to reveal a much larger picture. Life continues, people drift, and time does not wait. What Ricochet suggests, with clarity and restraint, is that learning to live with that reality might be the most important step of all.
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