Lindsey Jordan’s second album as Snail Mail is for anyone who’s been bloodied by Cupid’s arrow. Offered up by a self-professed but seemingly unlucky romantic, Valentine documents love in all stages, but mostly in disrepair. Its palette extends beyond pinks and reds: There’s the envious green of seeing an old love with someone new, the consuming black of bottoming out, and, occasionally, the clear blue of weightless bliss, however fleeting. Throughout, Jordan adheres to the credo that she first announced as a rhetorical question—“Is there any better feeling than coming clean?”—on Lush, the searing debut that turned her from a suburban teenager with wicked guitar chops into a beloved indie frontwoman.
Jordan, now 22, says she fielded 15 different label offers while she was still in high school. After signing with Matador and releasing Lush in 2018, she became a public figure and a magnet for parasocial attachment, drawing hordes of fans who saw themselves in her queerness and keen sensitivity. Amid this whirlpool of attention, Jordan found that her personal boundaries were too permeable; the overexposure caused enough harm to land her in rehab last year, an experience she mentions offhandedly once on Valentine. Afterwards, she handed her social media accounts to an assistant and hired a media trainer to help her deflect prying journalists. “Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?” she sings over a foreboding synth in Valentine’s opening bars, pointing to the parts of success that give her pause.
But now that she has patched the holes from which her personal life seeped out into the public, her music, more than ever, functions as the release valve. The title track and lead single sounds like the inevitable eruption: Jordan blows up the chorus with an impassioned wail (“Why’d you wanna erase me, darling valentine?”) and surging guitar, her loudness proof that she will not be erased, damn it. Valentine retains the exquisite vulnerability that made Snail Mail’s first record so compelling, but Jordan’s sound is more forceful, her touchstones more varied, her writing more toned. On Lush, she explored the expressive but limited possibilities of a three-piece rock band; on Valentine, along with co-producer Brad Cook (Indigo De Souza, Waxahatchee), she flirts with pop—sharpening her hooks, reaching for the synths and strings. Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.
Swept up in the early-pandemic migration that sent scores of twentysomethings back to their parents’ homes, Jordan wrote much of Valentine on the floor of her childhood bedroom, the same place that she penned her early songs of longing and languishing. Now as then, love is an all-consuming force in her music, but she writes with a deeper understanding of its destructive potential and a willingness to articulate it in arresting terms. Romance and alcohol are twin toxins on Valentine, each amplifying the other’s damaging effects, each informing Jordan’s perspective on the other. “You wanna leave a stain, like a relapse does,” she sings to a ruinous former flame on “Ben Franklin.” On “Headlock,”she’s mid-bender and missing an ex, “drinking just to taste her mouth.” A wordless murmur of stacked, sighing harmonies breathes relief into the song, only to be followed by the album’s darkest material, a wrenching admission of suicidal ideation.
Valentine takes us fearlessly to these extremes. “I have a really hard time writing from any place other than complete honesty within myself,” Jordan said recently, noting the lasting impact of her childhood compulsion to confess. But talking about music strictly in terms of confession often erases the skill that undergirds it, particularly when that skill belongs to young women. To confess is to tell, yet conventional wisdom says it’s better to show; Jordan does both, painting vivid images and annotating them with earnest declarations. In a haze of thudding percussion and distortion on “Automate,” we find her unsteady at a party, fumbling to kiss a stranger and pretend it’s someone else. “I’ll never find another love like this,” she laments, a recurring sentiment in her music. On “Mia,” she walks us down Broadway and spots an ex preening on the way to her new partner’s apartment. “Lost love so strange,” Jordan warbles over orchestral swells, an assessment that feels profound in her gripping voice, always straining and seamed.
Some of Valentine’s best moments come when Jordan’s textures are as bold as her emotions. “Ben Franklin” is an infectious highlight; come for the sturdy bass groove and the delicious irony of “Got money/I don’t care about sex” in the verse; stay for Jordan’s bratty delivery of “huh, honey?,” her melody doubled by wiggling synth and backed up with guest vocals from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield on the chorus. The slinky “Forever (Sailing)” brings trip-hop atmospherics to a tale of betrayal, borrowing its chorus from a 1979 song by the Swedish pop singer Madleen Kane. “Doesn’t obsession just become me?” Jordan sings knowingly here, handing down her thesis statement.
Obsession has its upsides; resist its pull and you’ll miss delirious highs. “Light Blue,” a cozy daydream of close-mic’d acoustic guitar and glowing strings that stands apart as Valentine’s only unburdened love song, contains this tingling admission of affection: “I wanna wake up early every day/Just to be awake in the same world as you.” Though something of an outlier in both its simplicity and its sentiment, this song is a smart addition to the set—it demonstrates what’s at stake when Jordan sings about love that she’d die for.
But obsession—whether you’re on the giving or receiving end—is also exhausting. On the same song, Jordan offers her partner a choice. “We can sail the ocean blue,” she sings, then gets real: “Or just lie down.” She shows a similar tendency toward rest in about half the songs on the album, most memorably on the delicate “c. et. al.”: “Even with a job that keeps me moving/Most days I just wanna lie down.” Jordan is hardly the first young star to write about the toll of her chosen path; Clairo, Jordan’s friend and an artist who is often spoken about in the same breath, did it on her own sophomore effort this year. But what’s exciting here is that fatigue has not muted Jordan or tamped her growth; instead of lying down, she shakes it off and keeps moving, chasing big sounds and big feelings. Even when she’s exhausted, Jordan is exuberant.
Buy: Rough Trade
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