Record [CD]

4-panel wallet with 12-pg. booklet.

“Nine feminist bangers,” Tracey Thorn joked when asked to describe her first solo album of entirely original material in seven years. Resplendent in Ewan Pearson’s unashamedly glittering electro-pop production, Record will be released on March 2, 2018.

“I think I’ve always written songs which chronicle the milestones of a woman’s life,” she says. “Different ages and stages, different realities not often discussed in pop lyrics. If 2010’s Love and Its Opposite was my mid-life album—full of divorce and hormones—then this album represents that sense of liberation that comes in the aftermath, from embarking on a whole new ‘no fucks given’ phase of life.”

On Record, the synth-driven tracks arrive and leave with a punchy sub-three-minute directness. The album packs an eloquent punch. As ever, the personal has often been political in Tracey Thorn’s work. Across four decades, her songs and writing have offered up a clear-eyed woman’s view of the immediate world around her, from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early ’80s band Marine Girls through sixteen years as one-half of articulate multimillion-selling duo Everything But The Girl, to her recent acclaimed memoirs and journalism.