Snail Mail — the project of Lindsey Jordan — announces her highly anticipated third album Ricochet, due out March 27 on Matador Records. Her first album in five years, she returns with a renewed sense of clarity and control, asserting herself as a generational songwriter with a sharpened perspective. While her early work chronicled the emotional turbulence of young love.
She returns with a new single and music video for ‘My Maker,’ which was co-produced by Jordan, alongside Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma). The single-take hot air balloon music video echoes lyrics about flying a plane to heaven, drinking at the airport bar, and contemplating life and death. Jordan’s voice soars over spaced-out mellotron swirls and the metric strum of an acoustic guitar.
Snail Mail – ‘My Maker’ (Official Music Video)
“‘My Maker’ was the lyrical jumping off point of the record, the anchor that helped me build the rest of the album around it. I kept thinking about the line “it’s just sky,” which obviously meant we had to make a video in a hot air balloon. It took six canceled rides for that to happen, but we finally got up there. I wanted the video to reference the lyrics about mortality, but also about the freedom that comes with realizing fate is out of your hands.”
Written during a period of intense personal change that included a move to North Carolina from NYC, Ricochet finds Jordan reckoning with questions she once avoided, namely death and what comes after. The album pairs her incisive lyricism with newly expansive melodies, ornate string arrangements, and hypnotic textures, marking a natural evolution from Lush’s poised guitar work and Valentine’s raw emotional charge. Sonically, Ricochet channels the luminous side of ’90s alternative rock — echoing Smashing Pumpkins at their sunniest, Radiohead at their most Britpop, and the shoegaze haze of bands like Catherine Wheel and Ivy — all filtered through Jordan’s singular voice.
After undergoing surgery for vocal polyps and intensive speech therapy ahead of 2021’s Valentine tour, Jordan emerges on Ricochet as a more confident and controlled vocalist — an ironic strength for an album centered on uncertainty. She recorded the album with producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma) at Fidelitorium Recordings in North Carolina, as well as Nightfly and Studio G in Brooklyn. The sessions, Jordan says, felt “refreshing, trusting, and comfortable,” allowing her to fully inhabit the songs without compromise.
The album also marks a departure in Jordan’s creative process. “I’ve never done this before, but I wrote all of the instrumentals and vocal melodies on the piano or guitar, and then I filled in the lyrics all at once over a year” she explains. This shift gave her more time to craft the expansive melodies that define Ricochet’s sound.
The album’s lyrical world is informed by art that grapples with existence itself. Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York looms large, while tracks like ‘Nowhere’ draw inspiration from Laura Gilpin’s poem “The Two-Headed Calf.” On ‘My Maker’, Jordan imagines overstaying her welcome at a celestial airport bar, pleading, “Oh, bouncer in the sky / Let me in, I’m scared to die.” Elsewhere, Ricochet mourns fading friendships, lost simplicity, and the ache of emotional distance — a record about being anxious not over the bad, but over how fleeting the good can be.
The album’s artwork mirrors its themes. Ricochet is the first Snail Mail release not to feature Jordan’s face; instead, a spiral shell floats in a distressed blue expanse, symbolizing both inward collapse and outward infinity — the push and pull of growth, distance, and perspective.
Snail Mail
Ricochet
1. Tractor Beam
2. My Maker
3. Light On Our Feet
4. Cruise
5. Agony Freak
6. Dead End
7. Butterfly
8. Nowhere
9. Hell
10. Ricochet
11. Reverie
