Fiona Apple’s New Album, ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’, Is Getting The Best Reviews Of Her Career
"The result is that this seems not so much an album as a sudden glorious eruption," writes Laura Barton of The Guardian.
Fiona Apple records are rare treasures, surfacing only occasionally — once every half decade, or perhaps longer. So the musician’s longterm fans are used to the aches of waiting, just as they are used to the sudden joys of new music.
After all, it’s been eight years since Apple’s last record, the era-defining The Idler Wheel. In the almost decade since, we’ve had some Apple projects: the occasional guest feature on a record; news about her calling out Lil Nas X in the most adorable imaginable way. But for the most part: silence.
That is, until last month. All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, we were gifted a longform interview with the musician and news that an album was coming soon. A matter of weeks later, we learned just how soon — Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the musician’s latest masterpiece, dropped in full last Friday April 17. Turnaround time between album announce and release? A month and one day.
A near-decade of waiting paid off, then. No least in small part because it’s another work of extraordinary power and dexterity from one of our most essential musicians.
And the critics are treating it as such. In fact, they’re already praising the album as one of the best of the year — if not the decade. Here’s what they have said.
Pitchfork Gave The Record A Perfect Ten
American tastemakers Pitchfork are very judicial with their ratings, and are just as likely to decimate an album as they are to heap with praise. Which made the perfect 10 score handed down to Fetch the Bolt Cutters by contributing editor Jenn Pelly that much more of a surprise.
The coolest thing about pitchfork giving fiona apple a 10 is that she almost certainly doesn't give a shit lol
— Michelle Neuffer (@lilneuffy) April 17, 2020
Highlighting the record’s antic, boundary pushing quality, Pelly called it a “wild symphony of the everyday”, and called “the notes of its found percussion and rattling blues” genuinely liberationist. It is, Pelly reckons, a push back against the pricks, and a rallying cry against toxic masculinity.
“In gnarled breaths on its opening song — feet on the ground and mind as her might — Apple articulates exactly what she wants: ‘Blast the music! Bang it! Bite it! Bruise it!’ It’s not pretty. It’s free.”
Fetch The Bolt Cutters is All Over The Place — In The Best Way
A theme across all reviews of the record is how scattered and chaotic the album is. Ann Powers, beloved NPR critic, didn’t write a review of the album, but she did tweet out a thread of thoughts about it, all of them highlighting its mess of influences.
“I really like how ‘Relay’ goes from an Afri-Cuban rhythm to a field holler rhythm turning on the phrase, ‘I resent you’,” Powers writes. “Fiona borrows a ton from African Diaspora music but she never simply imitates.”
I always like how she examines cruelty — her own, others toward her, the banality of evil
— Feeling Distant (@annkpowers) April 17, 2020
Steven Hyden of Uproxx agrees. “Over a clattering, rhythm-centric instrumental track — constructed in part from a ‘percussion orchestra’ of various instruments and household objects that Apple painstakingly assembled herself — she recounts feeling ostracized as a teenager,” he writes of the title track.
All of that adds to what he considers the record’s unique textures. “Throughout my listens of Fetch The Bolt Cutters, I kept having the same thought: I can’t imagine another person on Earth, living or dead, making this album.”
Catharsis
Fetch The Bolt Cutters ends with Apple’s voice panting, raw and ragged. It’s a feeling of pure catharsis; of getting on top of years of trauma and struggle. That’s the theme that Laura Barton of The Guardian latches onto. “The result is that this seems not so much an album as a sudden glorious eruption,” she writes. “After eight long years, an urgent desire to be heard.”
Charlotte Krol of NME agrees, noting that the album will cut right to the quick for Apple fans “old and new”. “It will leave behind indelible messages about her life and illustrious career, now spanning two decades,” she writes. And in summation, putting it as simply as possible, Krol calls it what it is: “one of her best.”