Thirstier

Description

Thirstier, the fifth album from Torres, pulls the miraculous into the mundane. It’s an open revolt against the gray drag of time, the burning, vital eruption of an album that asks what could happen if we found a way to make our inexhaustible fantasies real. Since the release of her self-titled debut in 2013, Torres, the moniker of Brooklyn-based rock musician Mackenzie Scott, has used her sharp-edged lyricism and disarming vocal presence to seek out openings in the everyday, parting the walls of the actual in search of an escape. After a pandemic year that lurched relentlessly between numbing dread and outright terror, Thirstier blows open the imagination’s doors. It is Mackenzie’s most exuberant and daring record to date, setting her sights on a sensational freefall. Recorded in autumn 2020 at Middle Farm Studios in Devon, UK, Thirstier marks a sonic turning point to a bigger, grander sound. The anxious quiet that had seeped into much of her previous efforts is upended in songs engineered for a post-pandemic celebration. Mackenzie co-produced the album with Rob Ellis and Peter Miles, drawing on her experience self-producing 2020’s Silver Tongue to push her music to an even grander scale. Walls of guitars, reminiscent of producer Butch Vig’s work with Garbage and Nirvana, crash and dissipate like waves against a heavy wind, carrying Mackenzie’s vocals to the fore. She channels her intensity into something positive and constructive, not destructive. From the country-tinged swells of “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” to the sour grunge bite of “Keep the Devil Out” to the reckless, overflowing devotion of the album’s title track, Thirstier assembles love songs from every angle. Romantic love, platonic love, familial love, self-love, and liberating spiritual love all blend and feed into each other. Mackenzie sings of a love that never knows depletion.