TORI AMOS - In Times Of Dragons

I knew a girl who wrote

‘Silent all these years’

Where is she?

We wondered the same thing: where had that girl gone, the one who in just a few years changed songwriting forever with her little earthquakes? After the thunderous stumbles of this millennium, we welcomed the newfound composure that began with Deutsche Grammophon and evolved into the solid “Unrepentant Geraldines”, though it later settled into a cautious, lazy adequacy in the years that followed.

Given such modest expectations, how could one not react with renewed apprehension to news of a towering seventeen-track concept album? A declared political invective — rarely congenial territory for the Newton-born redhead — paired with a fantasy imaginary populated by reptilian demons, sacred figures, rebel communities and mythological transformations.

And yet, from the very first listens, “In Times Of Dragons” reveals something profoundly different. Not so much because of the project's renewed ambition, but because of the sense of finally being in the presence of a work that feels truly inspired and deeply felt. The atmosphere is leaden, oppressive, often anguished; the compositions stretch into circular structures, rhythmic surges and evocative drifts that demand patience from the listener, but reward every pass with new details and connections within its labyrinth.

Every Tori Amos album has had a conceptual dimension, but rarely has it been displayed with such deliberate narrative clarity. The world-building of “In Times Of Dragons” revolves around a protagonist trapped under the rule of a tyrannical, lizard-like husband, forced to confront desire, shame, repression and the loss of her own identity. Queer communities, oppressed female figures, Irish mythology and Christian symbolism intertwine in a story that can certainly be read in political terms, amid authoritarian drift, the erosion of civil rights, and the isolation of truth embodied by the figure of Cassandra.

The only break from the allegory is granted to the most overtly political song on the record: the ballad “Ode To Minnesota” was added to the tracklist at the last moment following the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti during Ice operations in the American state, sharply contrasting the chill of repression with the fire of change (“Ice breathes in Fire's wind”).

In truth, the concept finds its real core in the female body and its transformations: becoming a woman, a wife, a mother, and reckoning with the difficult relationship with time and its challenges. Saint Teresa of Ávila, witches burned at the stake, Saint Cecilia: all these figures ultimately converge in a reflection on female desire and the fear of losing one's voice, both metaphorically and literally. When Tori sings “With St. Cecilia whispering: 'Without a voice he won't hear you scream'”, she seems to be invoking the patron saint of musicians to confront her own personal drama, the most terrible one for a singer: the loss of vocal range brought on by menopause, as she has recently confided while announcing her world tour. The concept thus also becomes deeply autobiographical in its reckoning with her own artistic image.

The record's strength lies precisely in how consistently these themes merge with its musical choices. In the more muddled episodes of her recent past, the themes often seemed like pretexts to justify unresolved compositions; here, instead, every sonic choice helps give shape to the narrative. The menacing chord progression of “Shush” immediately opens up a scenario of unease and suffocating control, while “St Teresa” wraps the listener in warm, sensual synths that turn the saint's mystical ecstasy into an almost carnal experience. “Gasoline Girls”, driven by Evans' bass and the dynamic Chamberlain's drums, strikes a perfect balance between muscular rock and communal spirit, embodying the wild freedom of its outcast sisterhood of bikers.

Even the more eccentric moments finally manage to find a credible narrative function. The lopsided vaudeville of “Fanny Faudrey” avoids the disastrous caricature effect of certain past experiments, while the shared laughter with her daughter Tash lightens the mood ahead of the delicate “Strawberry Moon”. A splendid waltz by moonlight, it recalls episodes like “Not The Red Baron” and demonstrates the songwriter's chemistry with the now vocally mature Hawley, who joins her once again as in the past, this time to praiseworthy effect.

Echoes of the past resurface throughout the record: the nocturnal atmospheres of “Boys For Pele”, the on the road framework of “Scarlet’s Walk”, certain harmonic fragments, images or lyrical quotes that seem to openly converse with her own artistic history. Yet this undeniable self-referentiality never feels like mere fan service; instead it serves the album's theme, evoking the reclaiming of a lost identity.

What's most striking is the restraint with which the American artist balances such vast and risky sonic material. Her recent output — even in its most successful moments — often left a bitter aftertaste of being too domestically managed. These pages have repeatedly called for outside production that might help sharpen the editing process. Despite her continued self-production at her Cornwall studio, flanked by the usual collaborators, this time we find in her a stylistic rigor that seemed long forgotten. The harpsichord returns, doled out with theatrical intelligence without giving in to revivalist temptation, the strings support without overpowering, and husband Mark Hawley's guitars remain restrained and functional. Even the creaks of the Bosendorfer, the “tlak!” of the harpsichord keys releasing, the tapping of drumsticks, or small noises deliberately left in the live takes all help create a sound that feels alive and physical, almost live.

The album's monumental length may be daunting, and it would certainly have benefited from tighter editing, but unlike in the past, one rarely gets the sense of facing filler material that undermines the emotional tension. A few passages don't quite flow as they should — the bridge of “Veins” remains needlessly redundant — but these are just smudges on a record that, along its way, rediscovers memorable surges and evocative power.

Moments like the wall of sound that overwhelms “Shush” at the utterance of the word “meat”, the sudden entrance of the harpsichord in “Provincetown”, the plucking harp in the background of “Song Of Sorrow”, or the pianistic acceleration that opens (and closes) “Tempest” deliver a dramatic power we hadn't found in her, with such consistency, in decades.

Yet the true peak arrives in the closing stretch. “Blue Lotus” is arguably the compositional high point of the entire work: a sinuous Rhodes-keyboard ballad with an exquisitely refined chorus, embellished by an eighteenth-century harpsichord. Chamberlain's extraordinary rhythmic sensitivity guides the song's majestic fugue. Here, Tori Amos's new timbre finds full expression: deep, rough, less inclined toward virtuosity but determined to explore the lower register with personality and purpose, shedding some of her past melodic excesses to gain weight and depth.

The following “Stronger Together” brings together the concept's keystone with another successful duet with Tash. While it doesn't reach the heights of the two tracks it sits between, it offers a functional transition toward the grand finale of “23 Peaks”, the record's unquestionable emotional peak. Suspended, almost celestial synthetic orchestrations accompany Amos's voice toward the rugged Crazy Mountains of Montana, in a finale that manages to be epic, imaginative and devastating.

The journey's cinematic outcome allows for no half measures: surviving doesn't mean eliminating pain, but accepting suffering as an inevitable part of one's transformation.

But the truth

The truth is, darling one

You will suffer

They’ll grow back every time

Because you need

You just need to accept

That this will be

This will be

When her voice breaks in the final verse, the song betrays its origins in live takes, far from a cold recording studio, revealing the secret of its magic and an emotional truth that wouldn't have looked out of place on one of her four great masterpieces from the Nineties.

The terrible and cruel price paid to the tyranny of time could have destroyed any artist. Tori Amos faced it after a career in which she repeatedly lost her way and contradicted herself artistically. When few would still have bet on her, in an age increasingly merciless toward the weak and those in difficulty, she decided she would not stay silent.

At the end of this hero with a thousand faces' journey, what returned was not the woman of the past, but a transformed and reinvigorated artist, author of the most convincing, urgent and important work of her last 25 years.

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12/05/2026