On Silver Tongue, Torres Is Finally Herself

By Max Freedman


On a unseasonably frigid November afternoon, Mackenzie Scott enters a Brooklyn bar wearing fitness center shorts. Scott, best referred to because the musician Torres, doesn't have some categorize kind of superhuman ability to withstand the cold: Gray leggings be noticeable from under her blue mesh shorts, with a matching blue tee and oversized pink button-down completing her look. The mindful layering isn't the only thing keeping her warm lately — her fourth and newest album, Silver Tongue (out January 31), is in part about a love that she regularly describes in no much less than over-the-moon terms.


"I've never had this feeling," Scott says of "being fully enraptured by" her love for her partner Jenna Gribbon, who painted Silver Tongue's artwork (and with whom she just moved in down the block from where we're sitting). "I think this is my first real love album," she says, referring to Gribbon throughout our conversation as "a genius" and perfect Though she's quick to gush about Gribbon in person, her lyrics while in Silver Tongue are far more measured. She's never sounded more at ease — really, she's never sounded more like herself.


although Scott got personalized on her 2013 self-titled debut and 2015's Sprinter, she recounted hateful kiss-offs and emotional fallout through characters and vague narratives rather than forthright stories. She brought her queerness and seething beckon into full concentrate on Silver Tongue's predecessor, 2017's Three Futures, yet that album's tales tended to exaggerate Scott's desires. Three Futures also infamously saw Scott dropped from storied label 4AD only one album into her three-record deal, and this unexpected change, alongside other sudden shifts, almost led her to quit music.


Instead, she's returned with her most confident music however while retaining the signature Torres sound. Her music still comprises eerie grunge-space rock guitars, percussion that mirrors robotic arms clicking into place, softly purring background synths, and her domineering, ruminative singing. The big change is that, by some inscrutable sleight of hand, Silver Tongue is the initial Torres record to also sound like a Mackenzie Scott record.


"These songs are very much me rather than the categorize kind of characters I was playing on [Three Futures]," she says. She occupies herself, not fictionalized stand-ins, like because the "ass man" narrating "Righteous Woman" and the seemingly murderous titular character of the ferocious, demonic "Helen in the Woods." As such, she drifts toward contentment as an alternative opposed to melodrama — although her current partner isn't the only person under the lens.


"The record is about two different people, one of those being [Jenna]," she starts before succinctly concluding, "and then one other person." In neither naming this person nor saying more about them, she hurls shade at a former lover without identifying how that relationship fell apart. She likewise keeps this figure at a distance while in Silver Tongue, forgoing the rage she's long conjured in her music. Scott's calmer, more level-headed approach can be chalked up to a new lyrical approach: processing events as they happened rather than after.


once something has already happened, you have the luxury of saying whichever you want about it," Scott says. "We manipulate the narrative of things from the past to prepare them be what we wish they were. You can't do that with a relationship that you're in the middle of. You can't trick yourself."


Scott's unflinching honesty with herself dominates the successive Silver Tongue highlights "Records of Your Tenderness" and "Two of Everything." The former depicts Scott first falling for Gribbon: "I can't get one word in front of the other... I can't believe you're coming over," she beckons over alien synth transmissions and heartbeat kicks. Her surprise is reasonable, as she wrote penultimate track "Gracious Day" to win Gribbon back soon after they nearly broke up.


Likewise, on "Two of Everything," a song about that unspoken other, once Scott sings, "What was it that made her think / she might have two of everything? / One of you and one of me?" Over astral guitars and sauntering snares, she's not furious that she's caught in an open relationship, and she's not scorning her ex. She's digging by means of the wreckage without squinting, attempting to discern why this person wanted to forgo monogamy.


"That song was almost called 'Polyagony,'" she quips. "It was really hard for me to write, nevertheless it needed to be written." The mental clarity she achieved while writing it empowered her, just because the song's lyrics might embolden listeners: "I determined to write exactly how I wanted to without [changing] things to be more universal," she says, noting that this method "is something I haven't done in the past."


Scott candidly centered her own artsy desires rather than those of others — made-up characters, fans, and music-industry pressures, the last of which dissipated right following the 4AD controversy. "I think that that's best left where it sits," she says. Still, this twist of fate manifested in another key way: Silver Tongue is the opening self-produced Torres record. With nobody standing between her ideas and her instruments, Scott had no trouble putting with each other her most unfiltered art to date.


"I wanted to do things exactly in the categorize I wanted and try all my weird ideas without having to bounce them off somebody else. ... I had the language and technical capabilities, and I felt confident," she says. That she self-produced her most lyrically truthful record is no coincidence: "I'm really able to own the way that I feel and where I am in my life." In other words, hiring a producer as "translator," as she says, isn't needed required for someone who's finally achieved an ongoing, unsparingly upfront internal dialogue with herself.





Take "Dressing America," a bold although logical continuation of the Torres musical fashion. As she sings, "I tend to sleep with my boots on / Should I need to gallop over dark water / To you on short notice," she adds booming kick drums under the final lyric to musically mimic mentioned galloping. A producer might strike this down as overwrought in theory, although Scott executes it so properly that it forms the backbone of the song's catharsis.


"Gracious Day" sounds especially like a unmodified rendering of Mackenzie Scott, partially because acoustic ballads are among the most naked forms of music and partially because they're sparse in the Torres catalog. A faint echo of reverb on Scott's voice serves a dose of desperation that the song's lovestruck lyrics alone may not depict (though "I don't want you going residence anymore / I want you coming house is possibly Scott's most clever bit of wordplay to date). String flourishes while in the chorus likewise reinforce just how deeply Scott loves Gribbon and wants her to stay, if not move in with her — just as she ultimately did.


At one point in our conversation, Scott tells me, "I had two or three years becoming a higher end person and simultaneously having my heart busted open by love, and that blend has made me very sappy." We're not talking about "Gracious Day," although this statement could certainly apply to it. Few Torres fans might have expected a lightly smarmy acoustic ballad on Scott's truest album to date, and she also didn't predict this current version of herself. "I never saw it coming, and it's purely because I'm in love," she says right after describing herself as a "softie." Ever in touch with herself, though, she's quick to correct the record: "I'm still a hard motherfucker," she says with a laugh, "and you could quote me on that."