Valentine

Ultimately, Valentine is the perfect marriage of concept and skill at this point in Snail Mail’s career.

The sheer breadth of sound is astonishing, yet easily pulled together by Lindsey’s distinctive wavering tones and lyrical impact.

Expertly curated, every single song in ‘Valentine’s relatively restrained 10-song tracklist feels like a fully-realised gem.

“Valentine,” her remarkable second album as Snail Mail, is alive with such crackling and revelatory emotion.

She’s delivered an album full of unrepentant honesty, decadent instrumental highs, and an unguarded emotional core. Few other artists can so perfectly capture the dizzying life-or-death stakes of those who love too young and too hard.

Valentine delivers on the hype and proves—in case there was any doubt remaining—that Lush wasn’t a whip-smart fluke.

Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.

She hacks away at the extra fluff and molds every song to feel as cathartic as an enlightening sob session with your therapist. We’re left with 10 raw, rock-solid tracks that feel just as restorative for us as they clearly do for Jordan. Valentine is proof that a breakup album doesn’t have to be sad—it just has to be powerful.

Jordan’s second record proves that the singer is capable of oh-so much more.

Some of the naggier aspects of her music remain, especially her strained, prickly inflection, still somewhat forced and certainly an acquired taste. But all told, there's no denying that Valentine is a singular statement that is profoundly genuine at every turn.

Even what Jordan already excelled at – her vocal and lyrical expression, as well as her skill with guitar –does not stagnate, resulting in a fantastic example of how a second album should be.

Despite the turmoil these songs describe, a flash of Elliott Smith-style emotional acuity every few seconds, musically Valentine tells a different story. Building on the confidence of 2018 debut Lush. [Nov 2021, p.87]

Sweeping strings and sparse piano merge deftly with Jordan’s melancholic voice on “Light Blue”, while the fingerpicked “c. et al.” is bare-bones heartache wrapped up in tender beauty. [Dec 2021, p.33]

It’s an album of growers, taking its time to reach unconventional climaxes. But there’s nothing fluffy about it; Jordan’s delivery is clean, precise and exudes confidence well beyond her years.

While it has quite a few tracks that stand out, besides the glamorous opener, due to their use of pathos-laden synthesizer hooks (“Ben Franklin”, “Headlock”) and moody refrains (“Glory”, “Automate”), the gentle ballads and groovy mid-tempo tracks that make up the album’s second act don’t seem as stylized or aggressively emotional musically as their lyrics demand.

No Snail Mail fans are going to be shocked or shaken by Valentine’s 10 tracks, but they’ll definitely be delighted at their continued elegance.

Taken together, Valentine represents both a bold musical step and a signal that Jordan is ready to move on in more ways than one, at the same time that it leaves some of her distinctiveness behind.

If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.