Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fiona Apple spent eight years making this album in her Venice Beach home. She recorded most of it herself using GarageBand, which she has described as a program she barely knew how to use, and credited that lack of expertise with forcing the album into its raw, unedited shape. Long improvised takes stayed in because she could not figure out how to cut them. Vocal performances stayed rough because she was not running them through standard processing. The production's apparent sloppiness was a function of complete control exercised without conventional tools.

The percussion is the first thing anyone notices. Apple built what she called "percussion orchestras" from found objects throughout her home: the bones of her dead dog Janet, floorboards, cabinets, her own body, her dogs barking in the background. You can hear them in the mix the way you hear a room. The title comes from a line delivered by Gillian Anderson's character on The Fall, a British crime drama, and Apple has described the album's core message in exactly those terms: get out of the situation you are in. The album was finished before the pandemic but released into it in April 2020, and the sensation of banging on the walls of a confined space was suddenly legible to everyone who heard it.

Pitchfork gave it a perfect ten on release, only the fifth album in the site's history to receive that score. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. The closing track "I Know the End" builds from fragile folk to a horn section to a cathartic scream that lasts half a minute. Nothing about this album is accidental.