Scout Gillett
Tough Touch
SLOUCH

Scout Gillett is haunted by the past. Her 2022 debut no roof no floor was ghostly and unmoored, mourning the musician’s lost home and wayward friends in Kansas City after she moved to Brooklyn only to find the city unrecognizable upon her return. On that album, Gillett evokes Angel Olsen with a breathy, Southern-gothic sound. She offers supplications to the moon on the trancelike “mother of myself,” while Palehound’s El Kempner provides harmonies. “I was born in a world I did not ask to be a part of,” Gillett sings. “I face tomorrow on my own.”

Her new album Tough Touch is often higher-octane, but it retains that emotional core. Produced by one-time Cat Power and Modest Mouse collaborator Stuart Sikes, it finds Gillett expanding her palette, reflecting on breakups and a near-death experience with grungy new influences. Opener “Too Fast to Last” suggests Bully, while the straight-shooting lyrics and lonesome guitars of “Gonna Change” echo Lucinda Williams. “I’m giving up this dream I had where we could love each other like yesterday,” she resigns herself. “Did you really care, or were you living in a vision of me?”

“Coney Island,” meanwhile, pays homage to Lou Reed through both its title and a promise nestled in the lyrics: “You’re my mirror.” It’s a breezy summer anthem with surprise synths, which beckon like a boardwalk arcade as Gillett promises escape. But even she knows it’s not so simple: “The fortune teller told me to leave it all behind, but the past won’t just give up like that.” Gillett may have moved to LA while working on this record, but her love for Brooklyn remains, and so does her predilection for lingering spirits and everyday mysticism.

On Tough Touch, she seems more comfortable experimenting with those themes. The risks don’t always pay off—at times, the contrast between upbeat sound and melancholy lyrics is more dissonant than complementary—but that sense of play shows in the way the record twists and turns. Centerpiece “Secret Life of Trees” was born from a grisly trauma: While filming a music video in West Virginia, Gillett fell off of a 10-foot cliff, puncturing a lung. As she coaxes herself to keep breathing, the song spirals out into psychedelia, as if we’re there suffocating with her.

But the fruits of Gillett’s labor to redefine her sound are most compelling on the album’s title track. A Julee Cruise–style heartbreak ballad, “Tough Touch” hits just before the album ends and has a powerful build at its center. Before, there might have been a whisper there, but in this new era Gillett takes the song to its edge, belting first “She’s alone” and then building again to a wordless cry. When she does go quiet, with a hollowed-out whisper of “Tough touch” as the song fades, the contrast is striking. It’s a cathartic moment, and one that shows both progress and promise.

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MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX

MUSIC, ART + CULTURE,
DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX