Fiona Apple’s stunningly intimate new album makes a bold show of unprettiness

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is Fiona Apple’s third consecutive album with a title to suggest that one of pop music’s flesh-and-bloodiest songwriters has cold, hard machinery on her mind. Eight years before this one, in 2012, there was “The Idler Wheel …”; seven years before that one, in 2005, there was “Extraordinary Machine.” Certainly you can hear evidence of Apple’s fixation in the records’ highly percussive arrangements, which often emphasize quasi-industrial rhythms — complicated beats tapped out on drums and cans and pieces of scrap metal — over the type of swooning melodies that defined early hits like “Criminal” and “Shadowboxer.” Music Deep re-listening: Fiona Apple’s ‘Extraordinary Machine’ Kicking off our stay-at-home series of critical re-assessments of classic albums recorded in California: Fiona Apple’s ‘Extraordinary Machine.’ But taken together the titles also get at the way Apple, 42, appears to regard her music as a device to process trauma: “I know none of this will matter in the long run,” she sings in “I Want You to Love Me,” which opens the new album, her fifth overall, “But I know a sound is still a sound around no one.” Render the pain just so, her thinking seems to go, and you might contain its ability to continue hurting or staining you — like a dishwasher or a rock tumbler or an engine burning up toxic fuel. In “Heavy Balloon,” about the difficulty of keeping the weight of depression aloft, Steinberg’s slithering bass is an almost tactile presence, while the album’s memory-jammed title track ends with the sound of Apple’s beloved dogs barking their heads off — a bug of home recording that she turns into a feature. As for her lyrics, Apple has never cut closer to the bone: “Well, good mornin’, good mornin’,” she sings in “For Her,” “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” Yet as unflinchingly personal as this music feels, Apple isn’t always mining her own troubled autobiography as she was widely assumed to be doing in her teenage-phenom days.