In Search Of The Antidote
FLETCHER’s second full-length album *In Search of the Antidote* is unfiltered and raw, a desperate and thrilling attempt to find joy, even during life’s lowest moments. “I\'ve been able to figure out who I am through music over the years,” the New Jersey-born pop singer tells Apple Music. “It\'s been the vessel for me exploring myself. Even now, looking back even at what all my projects have been called—*Finding Fletcher*, *THE S(EX) TAPES \[Shot By My Ex\]*, *Girl of My Dreams*—here\'s been these through lines of me just deeply searching.” That is evident even in the album title: FLETCHER asks what it means to find a cure if you don’t know what exactly is wrong in the first place. Just because you feel a poison, there may not be a cure. FLETCHER experienced this conundrum firsthand in 2023 when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease. The puzzling nature of the illness caused her to question the things she felt, and this journey from self-doubt to working through the struggles in song form makes up the emotional arc of *In Search of the Antidote*. “I went on a search to go find the antidote to what was happening in my body, and the antidote has been many things for me over the course of my life,” she says. “It\'s been the women, it\'s been fans, it\'s been stages, it\'s been bottles of tequila, it\'s been writing petty-ass music. This last year, it was healing. The antidote was healing and finding answers.” Despite the lows of illness, false hope, half-cures, and relapses, *In Search of the Antidote* is ultimately an album of optimism and triumph. The penultimate track, “Joyride,” captures the feeling of falling in love, of that moment when it might turn into more than a fling. She sings, “You were in my dreams/Now I’m in your bed.” “I think, for me, this album is about love in all of its infinite manifestations,” FLETCHER says. “For me, love is like giving voice to all of the parts, all of the feelings—the full journey, the rage, the joy, the lust, the being horny, your ego.”
Free from all façades, FLETCHER's In Search Of The Antidote is an unapologetic reflection of the non-linearity of healing.
“Here I f*cking go again / Holding up a match to everything I love.” Fletcher is “burning down the world…again” for no reason at all. When we meet her in