In 2017, singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott released Three Futures, her most aggressive, starkly arranged, and provocative album to date. Despite its direct lyrics and instantly memorable visual aesthetic, Futures failed to meet the commercial expectations of her former label 4AD—maybe it didn’t stand out enough against records like St. Vincent’s Masseduction, or maybe it was too unflinching to be as accessible. Maybe a line like “I’m not a righteous woman, I’m more of an ass man” would have trouble reaching a mainstream audience.

Scott wrote Silver Tongue, her fourth album as Torres, after the unceremonious fallout with her label left her feeling ambivalent towards her musical career. It would be several months before she started writing again, using her “cyclical muse” relationship with her girlfriend, the artist Jenna Gribbon, for an album about love as a stabilizing force. Her first album on Merge, Silver Tongue is less confrontational than Three Futures and less theatrical than 2015’s Sprinter (and less raw than her 2013 self-titled debut), but that makes sense given the circumstances that inspired the record. Scott self-produced this album out of necessity, due to a smaller budget but a wide-ranging vision for the record, taking equal influence from Gregorian chant music, Phil Collins’ percussive Tarzan soundtrack, and the in-vogue new-age legend Enya. Even as Scott’s ambition sometimes clashes with the content of the actual songs, Tongue is both her most intimate and eclectic album thus far. As long as the unrelenting stare that is her contralto takes prominence, it’s still Torres.

Scott’s Southern roots have long informed her music ever since she recorded her debut in “swamp rock legend” Tony Joe White’s Nashville studio while she studied at Belmont University. She would occasionally reference her upbringing in songs like “Cowboy Guilt” off Sprinter (the clearest precursor to her current electronic direction) or in the video for “Three Futures.” While she wasn’t openly identifying as queer in 2013, Torres consistently used cowboy iconography as a means to a gender-defying end. Silver Tongue opener “Good Scare” distills her background into a single line about Tennessee pickup truck sex, and even if she acknowledges that “folks here in New York [will] get a kick out of” country motifs, her references are more meaningful than simple namechecking. “Dressing America” is even sweeter, a love song of extreme devotion (she sleeps in cowboy boots in case her lover needs her) featuring a mix of distant pedal steel and blown-out drum machines.

That sweetness is the biggest change from her past records. Conflating an artists’ life with their music inevitably brings to mind the word “confessional,” a term used to implicitly dismiss a songwriter’s abilities to write beyond her own experience. Yet several songs here, including the penultimate track “Gracious Day,” unambiguously explore Scott’s relationship with Gribbon. The pleas of “Gracious Day” sound vulnerable, but Scott admitting, “I don’t want you going home anymore/I want you coming home” over interlocking guitar lines and eavesdropping synth flutes is as affecting as Three Futures was intimidating. The only weak lyrical moment on the whole album comes on the broader strokes of “Good Grief,” as the punchline “there’s no such thing as good grief” engulfs nearly a quarter of the five-minute runtime.

The way the lead guitar gradually overtakes “Good Grief” is uniquely exciting on this largely muted record. The mood of Silver Tongue is caught between plaintive country, spacey alt-pop, and jagged indie rock, but in a way that leaves some of the most confident songs Scott has ever written feeling strangely inert. Lyrical highlight “Two of Everything” is a (more) sapphic “Jolene,” only from the person about to steal rather than the pleader: “To the one sharing my lover’s bed/It’s not my mission to be cruel/But she don’t light up the room/When she’s talking about you.” A would-be standout gets lost in an arrangement both undercooked and overwrought, uninspired drum patterns clashing with guitar synths, both drowning out the vocals. “Good Scare” has the opposite issue, gliding for three and a half minutes then fading out—it sounds pleasant, but the washy mix doesn’t serve the lyrics.

The best production moments, like the chaotic, paranoid “Records of Your Tenderness” and soaring closer “Silver Tongue,” are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again. To rediscover her path, Scott sings more openly about love, about her love, than she ever has previously. The high-concept “gregorian country” vision aside, what Silver Tongue really depicts is the need to find comfort in a period of transition—taking stock of what’s still there and holding onto it tightly. In the case of the video for “Dressing America,” it becomes literal; Torres carries Gribbon, wrapped in a blanket, through the streets of New York. That could be as good an album cover as the one Gribbon painted; Silver Tongue makes clear that Gribbon has carried Scott too.

Buy: Rough Trade

(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)