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, Ricochet reveals a deeper fixation: time, mortality, and the quiet terror of watching the things you love slip away. The album’s 11 songs are steeped in introspection, anxiety, and acceptance — an acknowledgment that the world keeps turning regardless of what’s unfolding in your own small orbit.
Alongside the announcement, Jordan shares the album’s first single, ‘Dead End’, a standout that mourns the simplicity of a suburban adolescence, of parking in a cul-de-sac and smoking with friends. Sonically the song pairs a wall of grunge-gaze textures with a piercing lead guitar riff and sugary hooks, building tension until it culminates into an explosive ’nah-nah-nah’ singalong. Speaking of the video which she directed alongside Elsie Richter, Lindsay shares, “We shot the video for ‘Dead End’ in random places all around rural North Carolina between the hours of 5pm and 4am on one of the coldest nights of my life. The goal was to be inconspicuous with the fireworks, but someone called the cops on us.”
Snail Mail – ‘Dead End’
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, symbolising both inward collapse and outward infinity — the push and pull of growth, distance, and perspective.
Snail Mail
Ricochet
Album Art | Download Hi-Res Here
Tracklisting
- Tractor Beam
- My Maker
- Light On Our Feet
- Cruise
- Agony Freak
- Dead End
- Butterfly
- Nowhere
- Hell
- Ricochet
- Reverie
Praise for Snail Mail’s Valentine
“a fully realized blaze, multi-hued and emitting undeniable heat” – Billboard
“an excellent sophomore showing from the young indie rock powerhouse” – Associated Press
“Valentine’s pop sheen never overshadows Jordan’s unflinching honesty” – Pitchfork
“Her writing remains as unnervingly mature and crushingly vulnerable as ever” – Rolling Stone
“Jordan’s particular brand of longing feels linked to our new, digital-forward moment” – The New Yorker
“This is a no-skips instant classic that proves that Jordan has many more tricks up her sleeve” – Nylon
“Valentine builds on the emotional headrush of Lush in every way, incorporating new sounds and stronger lyrics and an immaculate scope that’s hard not to get swept up in” – Stereogum
“The earnest, rollicking tracks throughout her album detail self-destruction, masochistic love, and fame with an energy that teeters between loungy ballads and songs that absolutely shred” – Uproxx
“the indie rocker’s stellar sophomore album documents the precise feeling of despair when your first love falls through — and the strife of picking yourself up to find it again” – Consequence
