On 'Tomorrow's Fire,' Squirrel Flower leans harder than ever into an explosive rock sound. Read our review.
On her best album to date, the Chicago-based project of Ella Williams leans harder than ever into an explosive rock sound.Though her career started in the late 2010s, few artists today feel as tied to these last three years than Squirrel Flower. Her Polyvinyl debut,, arrived just a month into 2020 and, for many listeners, it seemed as though she’d emerged as a fully formed artist—with titanic songs like “Red Shoulder” innately at her disposal.
Released in tandem with the album’s announcement, “Full Time Job” and “When a Plant Is Dying” both feel cut from the same cloth. They each find their narrator on edge. The former is caught in a cycle that befalls creatives with as much ambition as Williams seems to hold—the constant need to be making things can feel like it’s creeping up behind you. She boils this down to the crushing line “taking it easy is a full-time job / one I’m tired of.
“Alley Light” finds Squirrel Flower taking on the hardscrabble perspective of a down on his luck man who may as well have walked out of a Springsteen song. Writing from outside perspectives is a mode that Williams has tried out before and excels in. The lead single fromwas a grunge-indebted song called “Hurt a Fly,” where she sang from the perspective of a self-assured, narcissistic man. There though, Williams still wrote with a knowing empathy despite her character’s lack thereof.
“Canyon,” an unassuming song on the album’s back half, is a true standout. Acting as the molten core of, “Canyon” is a slow burn, its story told through vague reference and little detail. Williams’ mother is pictured on an ill-advised drive to see a Springsteen gig. There are nods to highways, nicotine, the overwhelming power of nature and throwing one’s phone into the abyss. It may be hard to decipher, but it’s rewarding all the same.
As an acknowledgement of how far she’s come, the album opens with “i don’t use a trash can,” which Williams has referred to as her first song. Originally included on the 2015 EP, it has been revived and retouched, draped in the lush, cavernous sound its new home affords. It’s an interesting choice to begin an album that feels so decidedly like the start of a new phase of a career with a backward glance. Perhaps Williams just liked the song and wanted to polish it and bring it back into the fold.
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