Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Pitchfork 100

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wildstyle symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

The Guardian 100

(Epic)
The unhurried artist’s first studio album in eight years is astonishing, intimate and demonstrates a refusal to be silenced

The re-emergence of Fiona Apple, eight years after her last studio album, is not quite dolphins returning to the waterways of Venice, but an argument at least for the benefits of letting a musician lie fallow. Apple has always been an unhurried artist – there have been just five albums across her 24-year career, but a recent New Yorker profile documented how richly she used that time to replenish and create.

The Guardian 80

(Epic)
By turns offbeat, amusing and wistful, the New Yorker’s long-awaited fourth album finds her in mesmerising form

Few records released this spring will feature a dead dog’s bones as percussion, and what sounds like a simulated sex act between a singer and a piano. But then, few recording artists are quite like Fiona Apple, a performer whose slim body of work – this is only her fourth full-length record – belies her years toiling in the dark heart of the music industry (coming up to 25).

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a strange and exceptional record, even within the context of an uncommon career. It shakes, rattles and rolls with unorthodox percussion, and on the opening track – I Want You to Love Me – the singer hiccups in ecstasy, facing off against an arpeggiating piano as though competing to climax first.

She invokes Kate Bush, another artist who became famous very young and quickly outgrew the confines of pop

Related: Fiona Apple: where to start in her back catalogue