Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a materpiece.

In the soundtrack for the documentary Echo in the Canyon, Jakob Dylan recruited a number of artists to cover Laurel Canyon classics from the ‘60s and early ‘70s. For The Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” he picked Fiona Apple. And really, who better to sing a song about commiserating in isolation than Fiona Apple?

The gaps between her albums grow longer and longer. Staring with her debut in 1996, she’s released only 5 albums. It makes sense. These albums are the products of years of self-excavation. “I SHAKE when I have to think and write about myself,” she recently told The New Yorker. “It’s scary to go there but I go there.”

That’s why there’s such a nervous energy to much of her music. The rising piano on opening track “I Want You to Love Me” makes it clear this energy will be stronger than ever. The lyrics have always been the focal point for Apple, but here the instrumentals feel just as important. No other artist could have written these songs or made them sound the way they do. Sure, there are traces of other artists here. tUnE-yArDs comes to mind. So does Tom Waits. She even recruited Tom Waits’ engineer Tchad Blake to mix the album. But this project that is 100% Fiona Apple. The music and lyrics on this album are so tied together I can’t imagine anyone covering any one of these songs successfully.

“I Want You to Love Me” introduces many ideas that take over the record. She uses the same, sparse instrumentation that showed up on The Idler Wheel, but this feels huge in comparison. She follows the James Brown route of putting every instrument in the rhythm section. Often they’re not even playing a discernible melody. Sebastian Steinberg’s acoustic bass is used more for texture than anything else. It sounds like he’s scraping his bow on barbed wire instead of standard strings.

The song features some of the roughest vocals on the album. There’s a possibly apocryphal Sam Cooke quote where what makes a good voice isn’t whether or not someone can sing, it’s whether or not you believe them. Using that as a metic, Fiona Apple has one of the greatest voices of all time. Where others would vibrato, she quivers. Her throat scratches throughout the album. “I Want You to Love Me” song ends with these Yoko Ono-esque screeches. It’s not always pleasant, but goddamn is it enthralling.

Next up is the rollicking “Shameika,” which covers how one person’s words can stay with you the rest of your life. Apple swiftly recalls keeping to herself as a kid, her OCD tendencies, writing little songs, using her environment as extensions of the sound in her head, and being called out for it by her mean classmates: “I didn’t smile because a smile always seemed rehearsed / I wasn’t afraid of the bullies and that just made the bullies worse.” But one girl, potentially even one of the bullies pays her a compliment: “Shameika said I had potential.” The song stops for her to sing it. A moment of clarity not unlike the chorus in “Left Alone.” She admires Patti Smith, another singer whose lyrics veer into poetry, using her song “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)” as inspiration (sample line: “People said ‘beware’ / But I don’t care / Their words are just rules and regulations to me.”) But Shameika’s words are more concrete. They’re directed at her. “She got through to me,” she sings. Later on the track “Ladies,” she tries and fails to have a similar effect, ending the song repeating “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.”

“No love is like any other love,” she sings on that chorus. “So it would be insane to make a comparison to you.” It would be insane, but it’s impossible not to. Especially with social media, everyone compares themself to their current lovers’ exes and their ex’s current lovers. It’s so easy to research someone obsessively and make unfounded judgements about them and about yourself. She explores this idea on “Relay,” stacking her vocals on lyrics like “I resent you for being raised right / I resent you for being tall.” These multi-tracked vocals imply the woman she’s researching is also researching her. After all, “evil is a relay sport / when the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” Evil is a relay sport but maybe, hopefully, kindness is too. On “Ladies” she offers her ex’s new girlfriend a dress the ex-wife of a different ex left behind for her. A peace offering linking the three women but still bearing the mark “I was here.”

On “Drumset” it’s the man who left something behind: the rug where his drum set used to be. The rug reminds her it was her fault the relationship ended. He gave her the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech but she doesn’t believe it.

Past relationships are the basis for most of the songs. Some of them physically or emotionally abusive. On the head-held-high chorus of “Under the Table” she stands up for herself: “Kick me under the table all you want / I won’t shut up / I won’t shut up.” Her piano doubling her proud melody. But it isn’t easy. Her inner thoughts repeat “I would beg to disagree but begging disagrees with me,” getting louder and louder until finally they overlap with her actual words. She won the battle but the war isn’t over.

“Rack of His” lets us know that she was in love with these men whether they deserved it or not. But even when the love erodes she keeps hanging on. “Cosmonauts” opens with her saying “Your face ignites a fuse to my patience” but she stays because “I only like the way I look when looking through your eyes.”

The physical abuse takes centerstage on “For Her.” The first half of the song has a chorus of women zooming through schoolyard chants like it’s a Go! Team song. And then Apple bursts in like Debbie Reynolds wielding a bloody axe: “Well good mornin’ / good mornin’ / you raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.”

All this can lead to the emotional state she describes on “Heavy Balloon.” The song is about sadness being such a familiar feeling it starts to feel comfortable. A heavy balloon is a perfect metaphor for it. It keeps you weighed down even though there’s nothing inside. There’s a heaviness to the emptiness. It puts you in a place you need bolt cutters to free yourself.

The title track comes from a line Gillian Anderson says in the BBC Two series The Fall. It’s a small line but the kind of phrase you can make a melody to, arrange in your head, and grind your teeth to its invisible rhythm. She sings about other people making her think the bottom she refers to on “Heavy Balloon” is where she belongs: “Comparing the way I was to the way she was / Saying I’m not stylish enough and I cry too much / And I listened because I hadn’t found my own voice yet.” 

In her (in)famous 1997 VMA speech she claimed “this world is bullshit. And you shouldn’t model your life [on] what you think we think is cool… Go with yourself.” She repeats, “Go with yourself.” At the time it was seen as both a defiant and an ungrateful fuck you to the people putting her on a pedestal. But after years of public scrutiny, meltdowns, years-long absences, and soul-searching songs, the speech reveals itself as something else: a teenager pleading other people to take the advice she can’t take herself. She wants more than anything to be the person in her speech. And now, 23 years later, she goes neither toward or away from her ideal. Fiona Apple, finally, has gone with herself.