Lindsey Jordan spent four years on her third album, and for most of that time the songs had no words in them. She wrote the vocal melodies first, on tour, before a single lyric existed.
Ricochet arrived on 27 March through Matador, running forty-one minutes and twenty seconds. It follows Valentine from 2021.
Four Years of Deliberately Slowing Down
Jordan’s own account of the process is unusually precise. “I spent probably four years trying to optimise my process,” she told Guitar.com. “I worked super slowly, really trying to figure out what it was going to be.”
The phrase that matters is “optimise my process”. Most artists describe writing as something that happens to them; treating it as a system to be improved is an engineer’s framing, and it explains why the record took as long as it did.
The location matters too: “I was trying to write every day on tour, and I ended up putting together maybe nine of the 11 songs.” Writing on tour is generally considered the hardest possible circumstance — the days are structured around travel and a two-hour performance, and the hours in between are fragmented.
Doing it deliberately, as a daily discipline rather than as opportunistic scribbling, turns that constraint into a schedule. Nine of eleven songs came out of it.
Our piece on recording an album in four days covers the opposite approach, which has its own long tradition and produces a very different kind of record.
Melody Before Words
The detail that separates this from ordinary slow writing is the order she worked in: “including writing the vocal melodies before there was a single lyric”.
That inversion is more consequential than it sounds. A melody written to fit existing words is shaped by the words — their stresses, their syllable counts, where the sentence naturally breaks. A melody written first has none of those constraints, and the words then have to fit it.
The trade-off is legible in either direction. Words-first writing tends to produce lyrics that scan naturally and melodies that follow speech; melody-first writing produces stronger tunes and forces the lyricist into shapes she would not otherwise have chosen.
For a songwriter whose reputation rests on words, choosing the harder constraint is a real decision. It also fits the four years: a melody-first process needs a second full pass over material that already feels finished, which is exactly the sort of thing that turns one year of work into four.
Another Band Made This Record With Her
The credits describe a small, closed collaboration rather than a hired studio team. Ricochet was produced by Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who plays bass in the band Momma, and the artwork was made by Etta Friedman, Momma’s frontwoman.
Handing both the production and the visual identity of your album to two members of one other band is unusual. It means the record’s sound and its cover were decided inside a single shared sensibility rather than assembled from separate specialists.
It also says something about how indie rock records get made now. The professional producer with a studio and a rate card still exists, but a peer who plays in a band you respect is cheaper, more available, and more likely to understand the reference points without being told them.
The risk is insularity — a producer from inside your own scene will not push you outside it. Whether that shows is a matter for the record, but it is the obvious cost of the arrangement.
A Studio Full of Old Amplifiers
The recording happened mainly at Fidelitorium Recordings in Kernersville, North Carolina, the studio owned by the musician Mitch Easter, with further work at Studio G in Greenpoint and The Nightfly in Bushwick.
Jordan used a wide range of guitar amplifiers from Ritch’s personal collection: a 1970s tweed Fender Princeton, a Twin Reverb, a Vox AC30 and an Orange combo, among others.
Listing amplifiers is not trivia in this context. Those four are close to the canonical vocabulary of guitar tone — a small tweed combo for compressed warmth, a Twin for clean headroom, an AC30 for British chime, an Orange for weight — and using all of them on one record means the guitar sound changes track to track by design.
Some of the playing has drawn comparisons to the Goo Goo Dolls, and Jordan has said “Agony Freak” was influenced by the American indie rock band Pinback. Neither is a fashionable reference, which is generally a sign that the reference is real rather than positioned.
The Pinback citation in particular points at something specific. That band’s music is built on interlocking, precisely repeated guitar figures rather than on chords strummed behind a vocal — a construction that only makes sense if the instrumental part was designed before the singing arrived on top of it.
Three studios also tells you the record was not cut live in a room. Material tracked across Kernersville, Greenpoint and Bushwick has been carried between sessions and revisited, which is consistent with a four-year process and inconsistent with capturing a band playing together.
What the Reviews Made of It
The reception was good rather than rapturous: a Metacritic score of 71, with four out of five from both DIY and Dork, eight out of ten from Hot Press, 80 per cent from Beats Per Minute, a B+ from Paste, three and a half from AllMusic and 6.6 from Pitchfork.
Paste’s headline framed it as a continuation — “Snail Mail’s creative hot streak continues on Ricochet” — which is the reading the four-year gestation invites. The album’s stated lyrical themes are uncertainty, time and insignificance, and a record made that slowly has time as its subject whether or not it intends to.
The singles came out on a monthly rhythm ahead of release — “Dead End” on 20 January, “My Maker” on 18 February and “Tractor Beam” on 25 March, two days before the album. That is a conventional, orderly campaign, which is worth noting only because so little else about the record was.
A 71 is a fair outcome for a third album by an artist whose first two were received as events. The critical bar rises after a breakthrough, and the response to a deliberately unhurried record is rarely proportionate to the work inside it.
What the spread does show is agreement rather than division. Nothing in that range is a pan or a rave; reviewers broadly heard the same record and rated it similarly, which for an album this carefully assembled is arguably the point.
The Case for Working Slowly
Three albums in eight years is not a fast rate, and it is a deliberate one. Jordan has been releasing as Snail Mail since 2015, and the gaps have grown rather than shrunk.
The economics push hard the other way. Streaming rewards frequency, catalogue depth and staying in circulation, and the standard advice to a working artist is to release more often, not less.
Against that, an artist who spends four years optimising a process is investing in the one thing frequency cannot produce, which is a method that keeps working. Whether that is the better bet depends entirely on how long the career is meant to last.
Ricochet is out now on Matador Records.
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