These are standouts on a record whose hooks mostly resemble half-baked echoes of harder-hitting ones in her discography, whose production washes out the dynamism in her voice, and whose yeah yeah and na na na outros sound like placeholders. On some level, Jordan’s impulse to take refuge in vagueness (sonic or otherwise) is understandable, considering how the achingly personal music that brought her acclaim when she was barely out of high school led to a tumultuous young adulthood in the public eye. Still, something feels missing.
On “Nowhere,” she hints at a fear of being cast aside in favor of the next wide-eyed wunderkind: “So much potential out there/Always gonna be someone to take your place.” It’s a tension worth exploring, and few contemporary songwriters are better equipped to tackle it than Jordan. She brings the idea up halfheartedly and abandons it before she can get under its surface. Knowing what she’s capable of, it’s impossible not to hear her holding back, whether that’s through her uneven lyricism or numbed-out production. The structure is there, but songs don’t bite like they used to.
At the beginning of her music career, Jordan was (rightfully) hailed as a prodigy—a blessing and a curse. Lush isn’t just a great debut, or a great record by a teenager—it’s a great record, full stop. What happens when a young musician is no longer precocious, when what once made them exceptional becomes the expectation? And what happens when an artist starts out influential, only to have everyone else catch up? In the mid-to-late 2010s, Snail Mail’s fuzzy garage rock sounded cutting edge; toss in some twang (as Ricochet does) and you’ve got the de facto sound of 2020s indie rock—just tune into any college radio station in America.
Not every entry in an artist’s catalog has to be a revelation; perhaps Ricochet’s pleasant filler is a necessary step in the evolution of Jordan’s artistry and the trajectory of Snail Mail as a band. “You can’t stop now, my little cliché,” she teases on the title track, swaddled in a soft, bright string arrangement. Ricochet inches towards conclusions about aging, mortality, career expectations, and the passage of time and usually comes up empty—a true-to-life outcome. Sometimes, all you can say about such massive, unknowable concepts is Damn, that’s crazy. To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.
