Ricochet

Description

Snail Mail the project of Lindsey Jordan announces her highly anticipated third album, Ricochet, due out March 27 on Matador Records. Her first album in five years, she returns with a renewed sense of clarity and control, asserting herself as a generational songwriter with a sharpened perspective. While her early work chronicled the emotional turbulence of young love, Ricochet reveals a deeper fixation: time, mortality, and the quiet terror of watching the things you love slip away. The albums 11 songs are steeped in introspection, anxiety, and acceptance an acknowledgment that the world keeps turning regardless of whats unfolding in your own small orbit.

Written during a period of intense personal change that included a move to North Carolina from NYC, Ricochet finds Jordan reckoning with questions she once avoided, namely death and what comes after. The album pairs her incisive lyricism with newly expansive melodies, ornate string arrangements, and hypnotic textures, marking a natural evolution from Lushs poised guitar work and Valentines raw emotional charge. Sonically, Ricochet channels the luminous side of 90s alternative rock echoing Smashing Pumpkins at their sunniest, Radiohead at their most Britpop, and the shoegaze haze of bands like Catherine Wheel and Ivy all filtered through Jordans singular voice.

After undergoing surgery for vocal polyps and intensive speech therapy ahead of 2021s Valentine tour, Jordan emerges on Ricochet as a more confident and controlled vocalist an ironic strength for an album centered on uncertainty. She recorded the album with producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma) at Fidelitorium Recordings in North Carolina, as well as Nightfly and Studio G in Brooklyn. The sessions, Jordan says, felt refreshing, trusting, and comfortable, allowing her to fully inhabit the songs without compromise.

The album also marks a departure in Jordans creative process. Ive never done this before, but I wrote all of the instrumentals and vocal melodies on the piano or guitar, and then I filled in the lyrics all at once over a year, she explains. This shift gave her more time to craft the expansive melodies that define Ricochets sound

The albums lyrical world is informed by art that grapples with existence itself. Charlie Kaufmans Synecdoche, New York looms large, while tracks like Nowhere draw inspiration from Laura Gilpins poem The Two-Headed Calf. On My Maker, Jordan imagines overstaying her welcome at a celestial airport bar, pleading, Oh, bouncer in the sky / Let me in, Im scared to die. Elsewhere, Ricochet mourns fading friendships, lost simplicity, and the ache of emotional distance a record about being anxious not over the bad, but over how fleeting the good can be.

The albums artwork mirrors its themes. Ricochet is the first Snail Mail release not to feature Jordans face; instead, a spiral shell floats in a distressed blue expanse, symbolizing both inward collapse and outward infinity the push and pull of growth, distance, and perspective.