Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020)

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Every Fiona Apple Album, Ranked: Critics' Picks | Billboard

Fiona Apples' fifth album opens just as the triumphant return to recorded music many had anticipated. After eight years, Fetch The Bolt Cutters' opening track "I Want You To Love Me", immediately raises the bar, proving that Apple has indeed been busy these last few years, at the very least, crafting one of her finest songs to date. The album's greatness by now is well known, but where the grandeur of the lead-off track and "Cosmonauts" offers what many would expect, its the smaller scale tracks that truly define the album. "Shameika" offers a home-spun anecdote on an adolescent bully and the sense of pride one first feels as a weirdo, while "Under the Table" presents the same weirdo forced into a particularly offensive dinner party.

In years to come, this album will probably prove easy to pigeonhole; the heavy and diverse percussion on each track, the recordings of dog barks and dog bones, the general production flukes, and improvisation, but definitions like that only seek to explain this album's substantial character. That personality represents not just the attitude of an aging Gen X'er, but an artist with Apple's clout managing to remain both relevant and explosive, and creating an album about oneself, in one's house by oneself (for the most part). In the end, if there's one thing Fetch the Bolt Cutters undeniably achieves it's confirming that even as Apple works within the auteur theory, she is able to redefine all her music that came before.

~10

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