In a quaint London tea shop, Mackenzie Scott is distractedly fiddling with the handle of her dainty bone china cup. She’s trying to concentrate on discussing her new album but she’s half-absorbed by another, Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp, which is strumming its way out of the speakers and keeps catching her attention. She smiles and shakes her newly bleach-blond hair, jolting herself into focus. “I love this album, my god,” she blurts, as if she can’t hold it in any longer. “This is one of my favourite albums of all time.”
It could be a fluke. Or it could be a sign. Either way, our background music is fitting not just because Tramp resonates on a similarly intense level to Scott’s own, but because Scott’s second album as Torres, Sprinter, has the same breakthrough potential, destined for the end-of-year “best of” lists.
The blowtorch emotion of her 2013 eponymous debut is still there, but this time it’s couched in what she calls “space cowboy” atmospherics, thanks to former PJ Harvey producer Rob Ellis and Portishead’s Adrian Utley. She recorded with them in Bridport, Dorset, on the south coast of England, and they’ve made her angsty sound even more epic, sticking a flag in the grey area between St Vincent’s metallic tang and Brandi Carlile’s anthemic alt-rock.
Spectre is more ambitious than her last album thematically too. This time, songs about faith, family and existential dread are tangled with religious imagery and veiled biblical references that reflect her strict Baptist education. She paints her emotions in vivid, sanguine strokes, fuelled by a desire to express, she explains, quoting a passage in Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing: “Violent love all the way through to violent hate.”
Her childhood, she suggests, confined her to expression of a different kind. Now 24, she had “quite a conservative upbringing” in Macon, Georgia, where any free nights after school were spent at the church’s youth group. She would sing and play guitar during church services. “The thing that I remember most about those years is the pressure to feel something, the pressure to …” she takes an unnervingly long pause, “lift my hands in front of everyone and pray publicly.”
Torres still identifies as a “Christ follower”, but she says that clarity didn’t come until her twenties, after studying songwriting at university in Nashville and moving to Bushwick, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, where she’s been settled for two years. It took her until then to feel comfortable with calling out the church for its hypocrisies, and “the dogma, the guilt and the shame” that was drilled into her at a young age.
She illustrates much of this on Sprinter. The lustrously jaunty title track details a “pastor sent down for pornography”, and recalls the track she used to run in school and the idea of sprinting away from her past. In the delicate hymnal New Skin, she asks to be accepted and sings that, in spite of changing, she’s still “a child of God just like yourself”.
Much of her music carries with it a sense of not fitting in – and not just in the church. “Even after leaving home, the conservative south is not especially welcoming to any ideas beyond the prescribed constructs of gender that we’re forced to live with from a young age,” she says spiritedly. “I’ve always felt quite ungendered. I am a woman and I identify as a woman – but I’ve never felt particularly masculine or feminine.”
Similarly, she never really identified with being the Nashville singer-songwriter she was touted as for her first album. In fact, despite acts like Diarrhea Planet and JEFF the Brotherhood who represent a growing punkier faction of bands that sound nothing like traditional Nashville acts, she found it hard to find her place there. “Nashville doesn’t take kindly to … outsiders,” she begins, carefully. “I found it challenging to get shows that I wanted because it was a bit of a boys’ club. I wasn’t cool enough, I wasn’t a good enough guitar player, my songwriting was too ‘confessional’ to be in that world. But I wanted to be a fucking rock star.”
Cliché has it that musicians finally “find their voice” on certain albums, but Torres has always had plenty to say. The difference is that, whereas her first album was praised by Pitchfork for its “throat-seizing immediacy”, Sprinter is a tightly coiled slow-burner. There are still songs about longing (Ferris Wheel, in which her falsetto wobbles on the line “There’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do/ To show you I’ve got sadness too”), anxiety and coming of age. But new layers catch fire and peel back with every listen. “I wanted it to be a grower,” she says with a nervous giggle, “to make something that people would return to.”
One such song is A Proper Polish Welcome, which is her “attempt to rewrite the story of Noah and the Ark” while considering identity, possibly even immigration. But the poignancy of a line like “Rocking and holy, we came two by two” makes it all sound surreally sensual at the same time. She’s conscious of unravelling its message too much. “It’s layered for a reason,” she says, “but I was thinking about how being in the middle of the sea with people from all over the world really equalises everyone. You’re not really an American anymore when you’re in the ocean.” And the Polish connection? “I was very interested in Poland at the time. It’s completely by random.”
Random isn’t a word that springs to mind with rhymes as carefully plotted as these. Crafting songs so complex takes time. Torres’s songs are inspired by writers like Joan Didion, JD Salinger, John Williams – or the 1624 “no man is an island” sermon Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne, which is woven into Son, You Are No Island’s carnal foreboding.
Lyric-writing “sucks”, she says. “I’m constantly looking for a different way to say something that has been said over and over again, so I labour over them. And, as you can see, I’ve always had trouble focusing. My eyes are always darting around a room.” She finished the record’s eight-minute-long lament, The Exchange, days before leaving for Dorset. It had taken months to get right. “I had a mild fear of seeming self-indulgent with that song,” she says of its explicit autobiographical detail about her mother’s adoption and, less explicitly, her own (which she has already explored, written from her biological mother’s perspective, on early song Moon and Back).
The Exchange is particularly heartbreaking, though, for the detail that her mother’s adoption records were washed away in a flood; as Torres sings almost a capella: “My mother lost her mother twice.” “It’s very sad,” she says. “Anything that would’ve given her any leads on her biological parents were destroyed. She was devastated, and she ultimately decided that if she couldn’t find her biological mother then there was a reason and it was for the best that she didn’t. But us both being adopted, it’s a connection I have with her that I don’t really have with a lot of people.”
One the song’s most poignant moments addresses her, as she puts it, “crippling relationship with mortality”. For Torres, the inevitability of losing her parents is “my biggest source of dread in this life”, but it’s a fear she finds far easier to address in song. “My whole life it’s felt like I’m the only one who’s grappled with the fear of death. Everyone else has accepted their fates,” she begins, laughing at how earnest her words sound out loud.
“I don’t want to get old, I’m deathly afraid of aging, I’m deathly afraid of watching people I love age. I don’t want my parents to die, I don’t want to die. There’s so much unknown.” Her parents haven’t heard The Exchange, or any of Sprinter yet, and she’s unsure how they will react. But Torres is more concerned about them finding out that she blazes “Blue Dream/ so I can breathe”. “Yeah, that’s another topic that hasn’t been broached,” she says laconically, of the reference to marijuana.
Comparisons to PJ Harvey have perhaps been inevitable on Sprinter because of the Ellis connection – he produced Harvey’s first album Dry when she was the same age as Scott. But Torres has no interest in emerging triumphant on Sprinter as a Sheela na gig. “I’m empowered by the idea of admitting weakness and admitting fear – these are all things that we don’t really talk about a lot in conversation these days,” she says. “I’m not interested in presenting a version of myself that implies that I’m somehow invincible. I’m interested in communicating what it is that makes being alive on earth so … so violent, you know?”
There it is again, that violence. Sprinter isn’t the sound of someone having all the answers, it’s the sound of someone asking difficult questions and fighting back.
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Sprinter is out now on Partisan Records
