There’s a moment near the end of “Shameika” where you hear what sounds like a dog barking in the background, and you realize Fiona Apple recorded this album in a house full of animals and people she trusted, and she kept the dog. That dog stays on the record. This is the sound of someone who has spent a decade away from the machinery of the music industry and come back with zero interest in being managed, smoothed, or made palatable. The album was made largely in Apple’s own home in Los Angeles, with producer Jack Antonoff and a rotating cast of collaborators that included Tobias Jesso Jr., Blake Mills, Taura Stinson, and Ludwig Göransson. There is no single studio name to cite because part of the point was that this record lives outside the infrastructure that broke her before.
The drums alone are reason enough to sit with this album for weeks. Apple brought in session players like Syd Butler and Taylor Hawkins (who plays on “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” with a restraint that’s almost surprising), but the rhythmic language belongs entirely to Apple. These aren’t songs with drums underneath them; they’re percussion arrangements where the drums argue with each other, where the hi-hat doesn’t quite line up with what you expect, where a second drum kit enters halfway through to contradict the first. It sounds maddening if you’re looking for groove. It sounds alive if you’re listening.
The production—and I hesitate to even use that word, because it suggests intentional beautification—is aggressively lo-fi in places and oddly crystalline in others. “Under the Table” has a spoken-word section recorded so close to the microphone you can hear saliva; “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” the title track, sounds like it was recorded in a basement with the kind of compression that makes everything feel like it’s about to explode. Antonoff’s role here seems less about polish and more about creating spaces for Apple’s voice to inhabit—letting her be cavernous in one song, intimate the next, unhinged whenever she wants.
Lyrically, this is Apple at her most direct and most cryptic simultaneously. She’s writing about rage, desire, motherhood, class, and the ways women are flattened by a world that insists on their compliance. “Ladies” is a country-adjacent track that sounds like a Loretta Lynn song written by someone who just read theory. “Hot Knife” is the closest thing to a love song, and it sounds dangerous—sexual but on Apple’s terms, not anyone else’s. She’s 42 when this record comes out, and she’s not performing youth or vulnerability to make you comfortable. She’s performing the truth of what it is to be a woman who has been underestimated, overlooked, and has decided that’s no longer her problem to solve.
The sonic character is deliberately fractious. Nothing quite settles. Nothing resolves the way your ear wants it to. There are strings, but they feel like they’re being pulled tight. There are bass lines that don’t follow what the drums are doing. There are vocal harmonies that sound almost doo-wop, almost folk, almost nothing you’ve heard before. If you listen on good speakers—and you should, because the spatial information here is part of the point—you’ll notice that sounds seem to be coming from unexpected places in the stereo field. This wasn’t accidental. This was choice.
The album arrived in April 2020, which means a lot of people heard it while locked inside, and it matched the moment perfectly: a record that refused comfort, that demanded your attention, that made you feel less alone in your anger. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, and the Recording Academy was right to give it to her, though she didn’t show up to accept it. She was home, probably, with her family and her dogs, listening to records that mattered to her, and that feels exactly right.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Dog barking kept on record shows Apple's refusal to smooth rough edges.
- Album made in Apple's home with no single studio name cited.
- Drums argue with each other, hi-hats deliberately misaligned throughout arrangements.
- Production alternates between aggressively lo-fi and oddly crystalline sounds.
- Spoken word section recorded so close you hear saliva.
- Title track compressed like basement recording about to explode sonically.