The GG team’s top albums of 2020
Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple
Her first album in eight years, Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters is a defiant ode to the growth from girlhood to womanhood, to being complicated and difficult and alive. This is less a cry for liberation than a declaration of her own freedom — a commitment to be herself entirely and without apology, to take up the space she deserves. She speaks to the complexities of relationships between women — your ex's new girlfriend, welcomed to whatever you left behind — and to the mundanity of male violence, patterns of abuse repeated across decades and industries. For Her, my favourite song on the album, was written in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh hearings, but the lyrics could apply to any of the men who harmed Apple and other young women in their formative years in the industry — "maybe she just got tired of watching him / sniff white off a starlet's breast / treating his wife like less than a guest".
This article originally appeared in The Glasgow Guardian on