Fetch The Bolt Cutters

AlbumApr 17 / 202013 songs, 51m 54s
Art Pop Singer-Songwriter Progressive Pop
Popular Highly Rated

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

10.0 / 10

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

A

With the long-awaited release, Fiona Apple shakes off studio-production slickness and creates her most cathartic album yet.

7 / 10

10 / 10

Eight years in the making, Fetch The Bolt Cutters is Fiona Apple harmoniously unleashed

On her first record in eight years, the New Yorker teams excoriating lyrics with deliberately unrefined sounds. It's a visceral experience

9.6 / 10

Fiona Apple is brilliantly self aware and brash in the best way possible on her fifth album, a mesmerizing journey through…

Fiona Apple Balances Trauma and Resilience on the Triumphant 'Fetch the Bolt Cutters'

The reclusive artist’s fifth record, released with the world at a safe distance, couldn’t have come at a better time

About a minute into "I Want You to Love Me," the opening cut on her fifth album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple holds a note a few seconds longer than you'd expect, then a few seconds more.

10 / 10

A new Fiona Apple record is like a hangnail pulled to living flesh, like catching two rabbits jousting and leaping on the front lawn — a mom...

8.5 / 10

A pioneer of the indie genre as we know it today, songstress Fiona Apple released Fetch the Bolt Cutters back in April and it is her finest work to date.

9 / 10

Fiona Apple’s fifth album and her first in eight years ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’ has finally arrived, a record lovingly made in her

Offbeat, amusing and wistful, the New Yorker’s long-awaited fifth album finds her in dazzling form

10 / 10

Maverick art-pop songwriter Fiona Apple returns with an exceptionally well-realised record, full of viscerally painful moments and warmth alike

The singer stretches her talents in adventurous new directions throughout the album.

9 / 10

When Emily Nussbaum's superlative profile of Fiona Apple appeared in The New Yorker in March of 2020, a lot of attention was centered on a downright...

10.0 / 10

Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple, album review by Adam Fink. The full-length is now available via Epic Records and DSPs

The unhurried artist’s first studio album in eight years is astonishing, intimate and demonstrates a refusal to be silenced

100 %

Album Reviews: Fiona Apple - Fetch The Bolt Cutters

Given the circumstances we find ourselves under, it is welcome to receive an album that rewards repeated listening.

Apple picks up with her outspoken ways where she left off with her last album in 2012

Rare bulletin of crafted rawness from LA auteur's personal front line

9 / 10