Today, Grammy-winning singer/songwriter beloved legend Fiona Apple has released Fetch the Bolt Cutters, her first album in almost eight years. The title of Fiona Apple’s fifth album comes from The Fall, the Netflix crime drama starring Gillian Anderson as a police detective. Confronted by a padlocked door to a room where she fears a woman has tortured, the character commands: “Fetch the bolt cutters.”
“Fetch the bolt cutters,” she sings. “I’ve been in here too long.”The songs, as usual, are extraordinary. She is working with a four-piece band that includes drummer Amy Aileen Wood, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and guitarist David Garza.
Apple has a full load of rough-and-tumble compositions that make their own rules as they clatter about and gain power when she digs in. Apple is strict, playful, vulnerable, and ultimately sure of herself as she interrogates past relationships, as well as her own heart and mind, and asserts her right to be heard. Listening to her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, which drops today, the moments that shock most are its triumphant peaks.
It roars with the mess of womanhood, and across its 13 brazen, occasionally brash tracks its dares that you do not look away. Fetch the Bolt Cutters rewards an open mind, and once you find their grooves, their talons latch on and sink in, gripping you at bone level. Giving into toe madness, embracing the yawps, yells, screams, and cursing, it turns out, is the reward. It may not be perfect, but it’s pure. Welcome to pure rock catharsis.
