Since pivoting from the folky intimacy of her 2013 self-titled debut album to the more forceful rock sound of her sophomore effort, 2015’s Sprinter, singer-songwriter Torres, born Mackenzie Scott, has pushed her music and songwriting to their extremes. All the while, she’s straddled the line between art pop and art rock, reveling in the contrasts between moments of quiet introspection and high drama, often to stellar effect.
On her fifth album, Thirstier, Scott continues to embrace this approach, conveying her yearning with some of her most nuanced, delightfully disparate songs to date. The dramatic tension that results from the stylistic differences between songs is most apparent in the transition between the album’s first and second halves. The angst that Scott builds on the ambient-pop “Big Leap,” a pained account of nearly losing her lover, is released on “Hug from a Dinosaur,” a ’90s rock-style earworm that, as its title suggests, finds Scott at her most eccentric since “Helen in the Woods,” from 2017’s Three Futures.
Just as unexpected is the pairing of the title track, a cathartic rock banger, with “Kiss the Corners,” an eerie dance anthem driven by its skittering programmed percussion. Although dissimilar in production, both tracks affirm Scott’s undying ardor for her object of desire: On “Thirstier,” she sings, “The more of you I drink, the thirstier I get,” and on “Kiss the Corners,” she insists, “You remain, you remain, you remain.”
While many of the album’s themes are universal, Scott approaches them with a unique and often surprising perspective. On “Constant Tomorrowland,” an off-kilter reinterpretation of ’70s folk, Scott praises her lover as a “bringer of consciousness, bearer of justice, harbinger of progress.” To those accustomed to hearing love described as something that blurs judgment and breaks hearts, bringing about intoxicating disorientation at its best and total ruin at its worst, Scott’s adulation is a refutation of pop conventions. Tracks such as the grungy “Are You Sleepwalking?,” the dream-pop “Drive Me,” and proggy “Hand in the Air” build an original vision of love that doesn’t just burn bright and burn out, but grows more intense with time.
On her last album, 2020’s Silver Tongue, Scott rendered her longing with the same degree of stunning intensity as she does on Thirstier, but her expressions of love were qualified by worries that they were unreciprocated. Here, though, Scott settles into a relationship, but she doesn’t allow herself to be comfortable or complacent. Instead, she replicates the stirring desire of Silver Tongue with guttural, confident vocals and sonic exploration.
Scott’s lyrics are even more aphoristic and intensely devotional here than on Silver Tongue, often knowingly teetering on the edge of obsession. She’s wild-eyed on “Keep the Devil Out,” a chaotic closer populated by screeching, paranoid, and competing guitar riffs. One last time, as she displays her increasing musical self-assurance, she reminds her lover of the stakes: “Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants to die to get there.”
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