“Sue me, I like to fuck people up”: Torres on making people uncomfortable with barbed riffs and lyrics on new album Thirstier
The guitarist on why her new album is about unnerving people by celebrating joy, how she’s ditched her 335 for Teles, and her love of weird boutique effects.
Image: Shervin Lainez
Back when she lived in Nashville, almost a decade ago now, Mackenzie Scott played open mics with an electric guitar set to teacup-shattering volumes. Surrounded by the glitz and protocol of the city’s country tradition, she cut through with outsider indie-rock songs heavy on atmosphere and barbed melodies. “Sue me, I like to fuck people up,” she laughs along a Zoom call today, when asked if the pointed, riff-heavy world of her new record as Torres, Thirstier, grew out of this teeth-bared philosophy.
“I really like unnerving people,” she continues. “Who was it who said, ‘Comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable’? I can’t stand the idea of someone feeling comfortable enough to sit there and talk through my set, or any musician’s set. If someone feels like they can do that, then I’m going to make them feel like they absolutely cannot.”
But there’s another current running through Thirstier – it’s a celebration of joy and love. The last time Scott put her name to an album this guitar-forward the result was 2015’s stunning Sprinter, but there her latticed leads and counterpunches created an almost oppressive, crushing weight. Here, the same building blocks are applied to songs that glide and crash not like roiling waves but like confetti bombs.
Scott recently got engaged to the painter Jenna Gribbon, and their relationship is the bedrock of this shift in perspective. The pair have inspired one another – two of the many portraits Gribbon has painted of Scott adorn her album covers, both here and on 2020’s sinuous Silver Tongue – and reshaped the idea of the muse as a reciprocal goal.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Scott says. “We each get something out of it for the things that we’re making. There’s a lot of equality there. I don’t imagine it would feel the same if I were constantly writing about this woman that I love but she didn’t get anything out of that. That sort of one-sidedness would not work out very well. But because we both feel like we’re being fed, and we’re feeding the other, we’re both on board. We’ve agreed to feed each other in this way, and we’ve both decided that makes our relationship, and our professional lives, more interesting and more fulfilling.”
Snapping out of it
Gribbon’s work ethic also had a part to play in snapping Scott out of lockdown malaise. Last spring she was forced to abandon a European tour as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, finding a circuitous route to New York via Amsterdam and Moscow with tickets that she’d had to crowdfund as prices spiralled wildly. Once she was safely back home in Brooklyn, the whiplash left her in a state of creative inertia. “I pouted for a good two months,” she says. “I was so mad. But then I was like, ‘Oh Mackenzie, shut the fuck up and just do something.’ I was so tired of myself for having that attitude.
“For one, Jenna was working every day. She might have taken a week off, but that was literally because she fainted and busted her head open. She had a concussion – I took two months off because I was mad about my tour. I didn’t want to be the dead weight, so I made a decision that I was going to make this record, and that I was going to lift myself out of that funk I was in. I needed to be for myself what I wanted to be for other people. I made a conscious choice to make this particular record, but it took me a minute.”
Different perspective
Thirstier