SNAIL MAIL - Ricochet

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.

(From "Synecdoche, New York" by Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Among the leading singer-songwriters of Gen Z, alongside Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Fenne Lily and many others, Lindsey Erin Jordan aka Snail Mail has been writing about young love ever since her debut “Lush” (2018), becoming even better known with the intimate, raw follow-up tinged with disillusion, “Valentine”, which warmed our hearts back in November 2021. Among the central themes of her third full-length, “Ricochet”, produced by Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma, Been Stellar, Hotline TNT, Miss Grit), relationships once again take center stage, but seen from a different angle this time - an existential one, focused on time's relentless passing, paired with notions of mortality and determinism. The cover art doesn't depict the artist as in her previous records, but instead carries something metaphorical: a petrified spiral-shaped shell (or ammonite fossil), which carries a double meaning - an inner collapse, a kind of torment, and a more outward one, a sense of vertigo before the infinite (while also symbolically echoing the singer-songwriter's own stage name).

And a sour taste is all I’ll bе

In a bitter part of your memory

You can cast my lettеrs to the sea

But you can’t find anyone else like me

The curtain rises on the veiled orchestral melancholy and bittersweet undertone of "Tractor Beam"'s lyrics, which immediately showcases the blend of pop and alternative rock (often lightly tinged with gaze) straddling the nineties and early 2000s that permeates the record, as does Jordan's controlled singing, the result of a tough recovery and speech therapy process following surgery for polyps on her vocal cords - partly a necessity, then, but one that still fits perfectly with the chosen lyrics and sounds.

The guitar of the breezy "My Maker" looks toward Ivy and Sixpence None The Richer, while the strings of the enchanting "Light On Our Feet" harbor the seeds of the radiant melancholy typical of Smashing Pumpkins ballads. The axis shifts slightly with the horns of "Cruise", which bring in pop echoes of the Sundays, before the mood gradually darkens through the solid "Agony Freak", hard to pin down with its opening built on synthetic touches and gleaming guitars, right up to a bridge awash in emo and nu-gaze reverb.

Right at the album's midpoint sits its main peak, "Dead End", where the stars of the show are simple yet effective sing-alongs steeped in britpop nostalgia and bright guitar riffs, followed by the brisk "Butterfly".

The album's final stretch feels a touch weaker sonically, with "Nowhere" - a track inspired by Laura Gilpin's poem "The Two-Headed Calf" - the fear of death voiced in "Hell", the forceful return of strings borrowed from Billy Corgan and co. in "Ricochet", and the closing "Reverie".

A restrained (and perhaps, in its final moments, a touch too held-back) return for Jordan, "Ricochet" marks the definitive passage into maturity and full self-awareness, reminding us that moments of happiness are nothing but fleeting heartbeats, of which all that remains afterward is a fragile shadow to hold onto.

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21/04/2026