After an absence of eight years, Fiona Apple returns with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, an album created in and built from her Venice Beach home. She pounds on its walls, stomps on its floors, and turns the house itself into an instrument. The record thrives on makeshift percussion with handclaps, chants, echoes, whispers, screams, breathing, jokes, and even dog barks from the five pets credited in the liner notes. These sounds accompany her piano, her voice, and above all her words, which remain her sharpest instrument. The result is a restless symphony of everyday noise.
Taking aim at how power corrupts, how society manipulates, and how much of it feels like a rigged game, Apple is unflinching. On “Under the Table” she sings, “Kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up, I won’t shut up.” With arrangements stripped of smoothness or polish, she rejects anything resembling perfection. In that space, Apple finds the freedom to explore without compromise. Fetch the Bolt Cutters shows Apple at her artistic best, inventive, defiant, and unforgettable.
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