Torres ‘What an Enormous Room’ Review: The Threat of Loss Lurks

With each release, Torres, a.k.a. Mackenzie Scott, has unleashed newfound levels of apprehension and yearning. On her sixth studio album, What an Enormous Room, she pulls back on the eccentric, stadium-ready rock of 2021’s Thirstier in favor the kind of introspective dirges that characterized her early work. As a result, the album offers slightly less in the way of hooks but homes in further on themes of anxious attachment and personal growth.

With the swaggering funk rhythm of opener “Happy Man’s Shoes,” Scott reintroduces herself as independent and comfortably numb, shrugging off a lover’s judgment. “My star’s just on the rise, babe,” she deadpans before adding, “I love you/I love you.” Here, defiance lives alongside devotion, and while this seeming contradiction is characteristic of Scott’s music, the song subverts the desperation she displayed on albums like 2020’s lovelorn Silver Tongue.

Throughout What an Enormous Room, Scott ruminates on the joyous upheavals that come with marriage but also exhibits a freshly intensified fear of loss. Anxiety creeps in quickly on “Life as We Don’t Know It,” in which a foreboding countermelody weaves around Scott’s vocal melody as if it’s stalking her. The song is hypnotically fuzzy and brash, with a pessimistic view of relationships: “Yes, it’s true we’re drowning together/But we’re so alone.”

The songs that follow betray a mounting paranoia, full of lyrics about panic attacks (“I Got the Fear”), death (“Wake to Flowers”), and a persistent fear of infidelity (“Ugly Mystery”). Fear builds to anger midway through the album with “Collect,” in which Scott declares, “I am the Angel of Death.” The track also offers a respite from the wordiness of the songs that precede it, letting rage supplant Scott’s intellectualization with a repeated chorus of “I’m here to collect.”

Scott embraces something resembling hope during the back half of What an Enormous Room. On the organ- and guitar-driven “Artificial Limits,” she reframes the ever-present threat of death as motivation to live life to its fullest, dedicating ample space to the act of finding her joie de vivre and teeing up an unusually tender sequence of tracks to end the album.

In particular, “Jerk into Joy” is one of Scott’s most uplifting songs to date, and it posits that loss—represented by the empty room from the album’s title and spacious cover art—is an opportunity to create something new. Likewise, closer “Songbird Forever” is an ambient stunner with reverberating piano and, yes, birdsong. The steady hum of distortion breaks through the track’s blissful sonics, and, by the end, it becomes almost overwhelming, serving as a reminder that, even in moments of comfort, the threat of loss in the back of one’s mind.