Torres - Silver Tongue

Pitchfork 74

Mackenzie Scott’s fourth album is both her most intimate and eclectic. Its best moments are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again.

The Guardian 60

(Merge)

Mackenzie Scott, the 29-year-old US indie singer-songwriter behind Torres, is rarely more interesting than when she’s talking about her art. She’s described her music as “Gregorian country”, “Enya meets Phil Collins’s Tarzan soundtrack”, and “Phantom of the Opera [with] pedal steel”. It’s just a shame that not enough of the flair she finds for juxtaposition reappears on this fourth album as memorable music.

Scott has always been honest in her interviews and work, speaking freely about a childhood as an adoptee brought up by Georgian Baptist churchgoers, her relationship struggles and mental health. Where some artists might find this sort of transactional honesty debilitating, exchanging privacy for art, Scott’s revelations often seem liberating to her.