Mackenzie Scott has announced new TORRES album What an enormous room, that will be out January 26 via Merge. She co-produced it with Sarah Jaffe and it was mixed by TJ Allen in Bristol, UK and mastered by Heba Kadry.
The first single off the album is sleek, stomping rock track “Collect,” which Scott says “is about justice being served,” adding it’s “the rage song I’ve been trying to write for years!” Watch the video by Dani Okon below.
Julien Baker wrote the bio for the album: “What I can say about TORRES is I think the music comes from a convicted place…And I think itʼs just incredibly good music to listen to.” Read the full bio below.
TORRES has also announced a 2024 tour with Aisha Burns that includes a NYC show at Elsewhere on January 26. Tickets for all dates go on sale Friday, October 6 at 10 AM. Check out the tour schedule below.
What I can say about TORRES is I think the music comes from a convicted place.
Not convicted meaning a person is narrowly and foolishly committed to an ideal, or unshakably convinced of themselves, or a zealot, or stubborn.
I mean dedicated, I mean: If TORRES’ music gets weird, gets brainy, gets funny, gets defiant, provokes, deliberately scandalizes, employs the crass to undermine the austere, courts lofty philosophical truth—it’s all done with the conviction of an artist with the (essential) belief in the worth of their task.
I think you can hear it in the songs, someone reaching, leaning over the boundary between known and not, probing the almighty.
After a decade and six studio albums and however many one-offs and tours and articles read and conversations had, the parts of this pursuit I’ve been able to observe are all marked by a dedication to creation that treats the act—ongoing—with as much preciousness as the evidence of the act that is left in a record.
The modes of being are different: heartbroken, broke, furious (right– and unrighteously), awestruck by love, compelled by desire. sometimes resigned to death, sometimes fascinated by and reverent of the future. Sometimes viscerally present, other times suspended in heady awareness, poised on a fulcrum of observation and participation in the phenomenon that aliveness is.
The tools are the same: instruments that growl and shriek and moan, a lyrical voice shouting, swooning, chuckling, snarling as the moment commands. TORRES’ music-making is conducted in a melodic vocabulary unique to itself—methods, equipment, circumstances shifting around the impulse to affirm the self within the world, to make art that bears all these little artifacts of the divine and of the real and show it to people and know it is valuable. I think that’s what Mackenzie’s music does. And I think it’s just incredibly good music to listen to.
—Julien Baker
What an enormous room
1. Happy man’s shoes
2. Life as we don’t know it
3. I got the fear
4. Wake to flowers
5. Ugly mystery
6. Collect
7. Artificial limits
8. Jerk into joy
9. Forever home
10. Songbird forever
TORRES 2024 Tour Dates
Wed, Jan 17 – Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop *
Thu, Jan 18 – Chicago, IL @ Venue TBA
Fri, Jan 19 – Columbus, OH @ A&R Music Bar *
Sat, Jan 20 – Nashville, TN @ The Basement *
Mon, Jan 22 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade (Purgatory) *
Tue, Jan 23 – Durham, NC @ Motorco *
Wed, Jan 24 – Washington, DC @ The Atlantis *
Thu, Jan 25 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Foundry *
Fri, Jan 26 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere *
Sat, Jan 27 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair
Fri, Feb 2 – Paris, FR @ Le Hasard Ludique
Sat, Feb 3 – Bruges, BE @ Cactus Club
Mon, Feb 5 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso Upstairs
Tue, Feb 6 – Cologne, DE @ Bumann & SOHN
Wed, Feb 7 – Berlin, DE @ Privatclub
Thu, Feb 8 – Munich, DE @ Milla
Sat, Feb 10 – Baden, CH @ One of a Million Festival
Mon, Feb 12 – Manchester, UK @ YES
Tue, Feb 13 – Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
Wed, Feb 14 – London, UK @ Oslo
Wed, Mar 20 – Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge ^
Fri, Mar 22 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court ^
Sat, Mar 23 – Boise, ID @ Venue TBA
Tue, Mar 26 – Seattle, WA @ Neumos ^
Wed, Mar 27 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios ^
Fri, Mar 29 – San Francisco, CA @ Cafe Du Nord ^
Sat, Mar 30 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room ^
Mon, Apr 1 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah ^
Tue, Apr 2 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar ^
Thu, Apr 4 – Dallas, TX @ Club Dada ^
Fri, Apr 5 – Austin, TX @ The Parish ^
Sat, Apr 6 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs) ^
* w/ Aisha Burns
^ w/ Liza Anne