Thirstier

Mackenzie Scott seems to have reached that stage of her career where she’s just happy to please herself, and it’s resulted in her best album to date.

Thirstier's confidence and optimism arrived when listeners in the early 2020s were hungry for both. If making her music as big and loud as it is here is what it takes to get people to realize what they've been missing with her music, then Thirstier is a wild success.

With ‘Thirstier’, Torres has delivered her most varied set of songs yet; trying on so many different costumes suits her.

Eleven years on from her debut, TORRES’ songwriting remains as infatuating as ever.

It’s admittedly not the most cohesive album, infatuated with various experimental threads, but it’s also hard to fault this restlessness album, which is punchy and gutsy enough to hold up Torres’ constantly intriguing ideas.

Scott's ability to weave between monster guitar eruptions, refined pop and stripped-back moments that allow her voice to soar is a constant. [Sep 2021, p.35]

Thirstier comes on like a bold, heady catharsis. [Sep 2021, p.86]

Some of her most nuanced, delightfully disparate songs to date.

It’s as lively a rock album as you’ll hear this year.

Thirstier is exuberant and unguarded—the kind of music you make when you’re no longer testing out a new skin and instead reveling in the fervent joy that it brings you. At their best, these songs ride the contact high of a love so consuming that it shifts your worldview and makes you write songs loaded with screamable choruses and conventional hooks.

It is perhaps her most approachable and her most celebratory, and a solid reminder of why she garnered our attention in the first place.

Delightfully glitzed-out collection of arena space rock. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]

Thirstier is too melodic and hooky for a good heavy album and too heavy for a good pop album. But viewed as a hybrid album devoid of any specific genre, it’s a solid alchemy of Scott’s influences.