There are moments in many of Lindsey Jordan’s songs that make the listener feel like they’re being flown over all of their terrestrial troubles. As the navigator behind the band Snail Mail, the songwriter has spent the better part of a decade cruising through the choppy waters of young adulthood and the pressures of the music industry. Reflecting on her career so far, Jordan’s shoulders rise and fall: “I just felt like there were a lot of people’s livelihoods on my hands,” she confesses of her new album, Ricochet. “It was a lot of pressure to quickly come back. As the boss and the front-facing one, I feel like everybody can have an off day except for me. This extends to concert days, for sure. I have to make sure that if I meet someone outside, they feel good. Got to make sure I look like I’m having fun."
Like many of us, Jordan is still finding herself caught in the various ricochets of modern adult life. Born in a suburb of Baltimore, Jordan learned classical guitar from age five. Her mother owns a lingerie store, while her father works for an educational textbook company. She faced OCD tendencies as a kid growing up and had a complicated relationship with religion, but she found peace in watching movies and playing music. When she first broke through in 2018 with Lush’s lo-fi dream-pop/garage-rock sound, which was often carried by fuzzy guitars and melodies reflective of the album’s title, Jordan was anointed as one of the primary voices of Gen Z indie rock. Yet she wasn’t sure she wanted to represent all that—she was working through the vertigo of abrupt fame while most of her peers were still figuring out their majors. By the time she reached the synth- and emo-infused heartbreak of 2021’s follow-up, Valentine, her wunderkind status had solidified into something more sophisticated, more world-weary.
In 2024, she booked her first feature film role in the A24 psychological horror film I Saw the TV Glow in which she portrayed Tara, a Buffy-like character in the fictional television show The Pink Opaque. She’s interested in pursuing film more in the future, but this year, the focus swings back to music with Ricochet and its accompanying touring duties. She took the five-year span between albums to move from New York City to North Carolina where she bought her first home. Despite the job’s need to consistently be in the public eye, she’s a real homebody most of the time. “I don’t need to see another person. I can go for months, and I’m fine just because of how the job is,” she says. Older songs in the Snail Mail catalog were mostly written in her parents’ suburban home, and one of the biggest changes for this latest batch of songs was breaking out of old habits. “I became superstitious about the idea of being able to only write in my parents’ house...everything I’ve written that I’m proud of, I’ve written it there,” says Jordan.
Sitting down to chat about Ricochet, it becomes clear that Jordan isn’t interested in straightforward answers. She’s the kind of person who will turn over a concept she read about or a film she watched and put it on a slow roast in her mind for a while. During our conversation, she considers the ways she recovered from vocal polyps surgery, ruminates on death and Charlie Kaufman films, and talks me through the 49-track playlist of influential songs that she and her co-producer, Aron Kobayashi Ritch from the indie rock band Momma, referenced while recording the album. As a result of all the variety of sounds heard on that playlist—The Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Madonna, Avril Lavigne, Japanese pop-rockers Do As Infinity—Ricochet is a breakbeat-heavy indie-rock record that sees Jordan testing a brand new vocal range after the frightening ordeal of her surgery. “The recovery is fucking insane,” she laughs. “It’s like physical therapy, pretty much, but for your voice. I literally couldn’t emit a sound for an entire month, which was a really disturbing sensation.”
Jordan also discovered through her physical therapist that she had never been correctly trained as a vocalist, that there were ways in which she was using her voice to even just speak that could potentially be dangerous. “On tour, one of the ways I deal with any kind of voice fatigue now is I just go into complete vocal rest,” Jordan shares. “So there’ll be entire days where I just am a monk.” She also learned from her therapist that she’d been practicing bad singing habits dating all the way back to her Habit EP from 2016, wherein you can hear her vocals straining through the higher octaves on tracks such as “Thinning,” “Static Buzz,” and “Stick.” As a result of the surgery and all that training, Jordan unlocked a whole new vocal range, which results in Ricochet’s melodies often soaring far higher than those heard on her previous albums, while also exploring bassier registers. “It’s still something that brings me an insane amount of anxiety, but I can do this job better,” she confesses.
“As the boss and the front-facing one, I feel like everybody can have an off day except for me. This extends to concert days, for sure.”
Jordan was also very methodical about song structures this time around and made sure every track had a bridge and a pre-chorus, and in the last year of making the record she wrote all of the lyrics in one big batch—another first for her songwriting process. “I got to Frankenstein stuff around, which I feel made it more of a universe, lyrically,” she notes with a fair sense of accomplishment. One of the most soul-stirring moments on Ricochet is the Smashing-Pumpkins-meets-Jon-Brion title track that captures the feeling of persevering through relational exhaustion. Jordan sings in the intro and outro about the push and pull of a relationship where one person changes, possibly magnetized by the lights of the public world: “My renegade, can’t stand the way / I just bounce right off ya, ricochet.” Later, over one of her most stirring string arrangements, she sings, “No matter what, or come what may / I bounce right back to ya, ricochet / Into the hole that you dug for me / ’Cause I can’t keep holding you up, girl.”
Another thematic pillar of the album was Laura Gilpin’s poem “Two-Headed Calf,” which is centered on how an evil world reacts to the titular animal. “[The Ricochet song] ‘Hell’ kind of touches on it, just because I’m singing about the preciousness of vulnerable creatures and stuff,” notes Jordan. “A lot of the stuff is me talking to myself—and talking about myself—as a teenager in the music industry, as far as the exploitation and the innocent stuff goes.”
Countering the heavy subject matter addressed across the record, Ricochet has a joyful weightlessness, as though each song feels like it’s suspended in a slowly dissolving transparent substance. It’s that same sense of kinetic movement—of feelings bouncing off walls until they find a place to land—that defines Jordan’s conversational style. She’s as energetic and searching as her fretwork during our conversation, talking about her love of the film Synecdoche, New York and the deep psychic imprint it left on her upon first viewing it. “I just rewatched it, and this time I was like, ‘This movie fucking rocks,’” Jordan laughs. “I’ve been internalizing so much stuff from it that I forgot. The narrator the whole time is like, ‘Everyone you love is going to die before you, you’re going to die alone. If you find somebody you love, they’re going to die, too. All your friends are going to die, and you’re going to have to mourn them for whatever reason.’ It just shattered my little world. I was raised Catholic, and it’s not like I was still believing with all of my heart. I just think there’s a certain comfort to being told there is something [beyond life].”
“I became superstitious about the idea of being able to only write in my parents’ house... everything I’ve written that I’m proud of, I’ve written it there.”
After watching Synecdoche, Jordan kept thinking unnerving thoughts about the mortality of her bandmates and friends, and how she’s going to miss them all when they’re gone. “Thinking about mourning them, it was ruining my quality of life for years, and it would just happen in this way where it was the intrusive thought that would come to me whenever I was feeling good,” she recalls. “I’m in a better place with it now, for sure. It still is a problem for me in some ways, especially now that I’m a dog owner. I think about it with her a lot.” When it was time to record with friend and co-producer Ritch, Jordan wanted to express those thoughts about the afterlife in a comfortable, natural way. “I definitely didn’t want to come off as a religious expert or sage, or I felt like I knew better. But I also didn’t want to come off super nihilist, which I feel like is kind of where I lean a little bit naturally.”
For collaborator Ritch, who originally met Jordan while Momma toured with Snail Mail during the summer of 2022, he really enjoyed his time working with Jordan, describing Ricochet’s sonic style as “classic but new, darker and more introspective, but still fun.” During recording sessions, the “24/7 hang” vibe he shared with Jordan while on tour continued as the duo exchanged music via their joint playlist while recording at Jordan’s house in North Carolina. They also got really into watching horror movies at night after long studio days. “We’re both big horror movie fans, and at the time I was going through a ’90s/2000s J-horror phase, so I remember we got into this movie Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa around then,” Ritch recalls. “When we eventually got into the process of demoing the songs for the album, and I was staying at her house in North Carolina for weeks, we’d almost always end the work day with some kind of movie night.”
“A lot of the stuff is me talking to myself—and talking about myself—as a teenager in the music industry, as far as the exploitation and the innocent stuff goes.”
Ricochet was an opportunity for Jordan to stretch not only her vocals, but also her songwriting process as she spent an inordinate amount of time carefully working on the structural flow of each track. Despite that experimentation, “it was very comfortable working on this album,” Jordan remembers. The songwriting duo agreed on mostly every aspect, and Jordan has never sounded steadier as a vocalist as a result. The energetic rasp that defined Lush has matured into a controlled, soulful weariness. When she sings about the cyclical nature of a haunting subject, her voice doesn’t crack; it lingers, stretching out over the steady heartbeat of the percussion. Snail Mail still offers the realization that sometimes the things we throw away have a way of finding their way back to us, hitting just as hard the second time around. FL
