INTERVIEW: Torres releases new album 'Thirstier': "I'm always just trying to tell, or uncover, some kind of truth."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Shervin Lainez
US indie-rocker TORRES (full name Mackenzie Scott) today releases her fifth studio album Thirstier.
Recorded at Middle Farm Studios in Devon, UK, at the end of last year the album is tailored for a ‘post-plague celebration’ of love in all its forms - platonic love, deep desire, familial love, self-love. Turning up the sound from her previous more introspective album Silver Tongue the ten tracks on the album are a glorious collection of different soundscapes with Scott experimenting with everything from country twangs on title track ‘Thirstier’, to trance synthpop on ‘Kiss The Corners’ through to hard guitar rock on album opener ‘Are You Sleepwalking?’
Coming from a period of industrious productivity from Scott, the album is her second in as many years after the release of Silver Tongue in 2020. With Thirstier being created in the middle of the pandemic, Scott wanted to make an album that was less cerebral and more corporal - something that would make the body move and would allow her to construct an equally active live experience when concerts are possible again.
Thirstier is a strong, powerful album that while certainly achieving Scott’s aim of making the body move, takes you on a journey as a listener as each track draws you in with a different emotive punch each time. With it’s changing soundscapeThirstier is not a typical pop or rock album, but it is all the more better for exactly that reason and is a highly recommended listen. We recently caught up with TORRES to find out more.
Hi Mackenzie, it’s so lovely to chat with you today. Your fifth album Thirstier is complete and out in the world. How are you feeling about it all?
Oh, I'm excited for it to be out there. I hope people love it.
Your vocals, and this goes for all your albums, are incredible. They are something almost like power ballad musical theatre in combination with Kim Deal from the Breeders and Courtney Love. It's incredibly encompassing. Where did your passion for music and then singing and creating your own come from?
It's funny that you mentioned musical theatre. I don't have my toes dipped in that world anymore, but I essentially started singing because I got really into musical theatre. I watched 'The Phantom of the Opera' and, I don't know, it made me want to sing. It sucked me right in. As a young teenager, I just felt like it was so expressive in this way that if I could somehow incorporate my favourite elements of that world into performing my own songs that that would be the most ideal job.
It’s an incredible job. And with regards to songwriting, were you always a playing lyrically? Or did the music and the melody come first?
As a kid, I was really into writing poems, and writing in general has always really been kind of my favourite thing. Short stories and poems and essays and things like that, but I was writing really super innocent kid poems about nature, and heartbreak that didn't actually exist! I played the piano my whole life, but I wasn't singing yet or writing songs until around the age of 16 or 17, I started playing guitar. I happened to have an acoustic guitar and I had a friend that was really into playing the acoustic guitar. And so I got interested, and whenever I started strumming chords on the guitar and made up my own little finger picking style that worked for me, I started trying to put the poetry over melodies that I would pick out, and it just kind of turned into songwriting.
Your latest album Thirstier is just an eclectic family of songs and they're all emoting different reactions. What were you reading, listening to, dancing to when you were hit by the desire to create the album?
My girlfriend who I live with, she's such a music fan. She was a teenager in the 90s and she got me into all these bands that I never listened to before. She introduced me to Hole and Sonic Youth, all these bands you would think that I was super into but I'd actually never listened to. I've loved PJ Harvey for many years, and there was a lot of PJ Harvey in the house as well. Tori Amos and Kate Bush are always on rotation. I was, I guess, listening to a lot of a lot of 90s rock.
The title track 'Thirstier' is just everything for me. You've got that lyric. 'But I if I've got permission to stay under your skin, you'll never want another love as long as you live'. There's like this kind of husky babe country purr right there. Can you talk me through the creation and composition of this track? Because I adore it.
Oh, thank you. I mean, the country thing is for real. I'm a dyed in the wool country music fan. I'm from Macon, Georgia. So the country music is constantly in rotation around the house, that's a very good ear you have! It's funny, that bridge was actually the last thing that I added to the song. I had demoed all of the songs and I brought them into the studio, and they were just about all ready to go. But that one, the day before actually recording the song didn't have a bridge, but I just felt like it was missing something. And, you know, it was that line.
Oh, and that line, that's now gotta be tattooed on bodies across the world. That's a tattoo lyric right there!
I mean, I can't say that I don't love that...!
Again with that track, it is obviously the the title track to the album was that always the intention?
I had already started writing the album andI didn't have a title yet. It was like maybe song five that I wrote out of ten for the album. Pretty immediately after I finished writing it and making that demo I knew that that was the one. It just felt it…I don't know, I can always tell. I can always tell when I've written something that I think people will like and I hope I'm right about this one. It just felt like the heart of what I wanted to say with the entire body of work, which is I've got this eternal desire for everything. I can't get my fill of love or of any of the sensual experiences that we get to have as humans. I'll never get my fill and I just I wanted to reflect that in the music in a way that felt like endless desire.
That's beautiful. It's there's a real decadence to it, which I love while also being stripped back. I actually want to go to 'Don't Go Puttin Wishes In My Head' which is such a cool song with such a beautiful accompanying video. You have just absolutely nailed the skill of divine heartbreaking love songs with no schmaltz whatsoever. Can you talk me through that one, because I read an interview or a comment that you said it was your relentless country star arena moment?
I was actually thinking specifically of that song 'It's Your Love' that Tim McGraw and Faith Hill sing together. Which, very unironically, is one of my favourite songs of all time! I grew up listening to it and I just sang my heart out every time it came on - I can sing both parts! I wanted to make a song like that or just felt like a never ending chorus basically. I wanted to make something that could be so cheesy if it were in the wrong hands, but, my intention was to commit to it so hard that it that it's just undeniable. You know what I mean? Like, you just can't not eat it up.
You released the Silver Tongue album just last year, and I imagine you had the build up and and subsequent, albeit altered, performances and promotion while working on Thirstier, which is a completely different body of work entirely. What's your creative space like that when you you really have to divide yourself into two very different projects?
I wrote and recorded Silver Tongue and released it and kind of psychically released it not just physically. I kind of like let go of the idea, or the headspace that I was in when I wrote those songs, and I went fully into performance mode, because I anticipated being on tour for a long time. So I was kind of already in that extroverted headspace. And then the tour, as you know, got moved or cancelled and so I just knew that I needed to switch gears and make something new, because I knew that whenever it was possible to play shows again, for Silver Tongue the time would have passed. I needed to have a new new record, essentially. And I decided to write one but I was already in that really extroverted headspace so I think that really contributed to my ability to just go right into making something that is not a very heady album, you know, it's a very bodily album, you know what I mean? You move, you don't think about it, you move. And that's the space that I was in beforehand, being on tour and being so ready to move and to throw my body around the stage. It just felt I was primed to make the album.
I want to talk to you about your 2017 album Three Futures which you said at the time was 'entirely about using the body that each of us has been given as a mechanism of joy'. What was the reaction that you personally received to that album being so I guess, so visceral?
That album was you know, met with a lot of confusion. A lot of people enjoyed and continue to enjoy that album. But you know, I definitely got the sense that it was a mixed bag. It didn't hit home for some people. Some people it felt like they really got it and it meant something to them. I was a bit more obtuse on that album than I have been on other albums, it was a smaller percentage of people who who were in the place that I was maybe at the time that I released that album,
Silver Tongue was cited as your most intimate and eclectic album thus far, but then came Thirstier. You spoke about Three Futures being obtuse, as an artist how do you balance that creative freedom and experimentation with what I imagine also to be quite a lot of pressure to make, you know, the record that is a hit, gets great reviews and can be toured?
I take a slightly different approach with each record. But the thing that I always try to do is make sure that whatever it is I'm making, I try to make sure that I'm really feeling it. Because more than anything, people won't believe me if I'm really not feeling it. If I really don't believe what I'm saying, then other people will sniff that out. I'm always just trying to tell, or uncover, some kind of truth.
And I guess, now in the world of streaming that we have all we've had for quite a while now, the good thing for an artist is you really can curate it yourself. People will pick and choose the songs they like, so you can create a body of work to represent this, as opposed to ‘oh, we should have three hits here and one over here and one over here’. That must also be quite liberating in a way?
Yeah, sure. I really just try and read the room also, especially making this new album Thirstier. I really just tried to feel what I thought people needed and would need in the near future and try and really connect with my audience in a way that maybe I hadn't tried to before.
The music industry, be it pop, alternative, the whole industry is a rewarding and savage beast. Have you yourself ever felt that you needed to be that much louder? That much better? That much more powerful, prettier, smarter, harder, more savage just to be heard in what is a very white male saturated environment?
I will not tell a lie. I am all of those things. I'm trying to be all of those things all the time. What I would say is it no one hands you opportunities, they have to be taken. You're right. It's totally savage. And and only people who really, really want to be doing this should be doing it.
Before I leave you, Mackenzie, what's coming up for you?
Oh, thank you for asking. I'm going to go on tour. I'm pretty sure it's going to happen in the fall. I'm gonna do a North American tour and then in the spring, I'm going to do a European and UK tour. And hopefully more tours after that as well.
Amazing, if Australia gets vaccinated, you should come down here!
I am! I'm making plans…
