Lindsey Jordan’s songwriting thrives in moments that would slip away were it not for her painstaking dissections: split-second eyelocks across crowded rooms, crushing comments dropped into innocuous conversations, the nervous stammering that precedes a confession—and the silence that hangs in the air while the person who just poured their heart out awaits a response. Snail Mail’s 2018 debut LP, Lush, felt like a coming-of-age dramedy, with Jordan starring as a savvy-but-sensitive teen swept up in a whirlwind of growing pains; three years later, Valentine took the darker, more mature tone of a prestige queer romance, its heroine shifting between stoicism and tragic passion. Ricochet aims for the affective highs and lows of its predecessors using Snail Mail’s signature grunge- and dream pop-inflected guitar rock, albeit with more of a country slant this time around. But Ricochet lacks the urgency, emotional specificity, and crisp production of Snail Mail’s earlier releases, leaving Jordan’s snapshots of interpersonal and existential turmoil feeling stilted.

On previous records, Jordan’s slacker cadence offered a note of contrast that emphasized her music’s emotional peaks. On Ricochet, it feels like a distancing tactic, with sun-drenched string builds and manufactured tenderness taking shortcuts to catharsis. “To be loved is to be changed” might elicit an awww as a caption for before-and-after photos of a well-loved Garfield plushie—not so much as a line in a fuzzy-guitared alt-country song that sounds like any number of fuzzy-guitared alt-country songs released in the past four years. The allusion to Laura Gilpin’s poem “Two-Headed Calf” on “Nowhere” suffers from a similar flatness, a gesture toward heartwarming imagery that’s left to do the heavy lifting.

Shortly after releasing Valentine, Jordan underwent surgery to have polyps removed from her vocal cords and worked with a speech therapist to re-train her voice. Knowing the challenges makes it especially frustrating to hear her singing get buried in Ricochet’s smudgy mix. Even when Jordan’s lyrics are poignant and her delivery emphatic, her vocals spend most of the album swimming in Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s shapeless production—a far cry from the crystalline textures of “Pristine” and “Heat Wave.”

Thankfully, not all of Ricochet gets lost in the haze. Closer “Reverie” is refreshingly sparse, focused on Jordan’s swaggering guitar and sardonic quips about a “big shot” who’s “playing rockstar with his daddy’s cash.” Jordan, disillusioned with celebrity culture, dismisses former idols as “nothing more than socialites” and sings about seeking authenticity and connection out of the spotlight. “Hell,” Ricochet’s best track and one of many concerned with the afterlife—one in which heaven has a bouncer and an airport bar where you can grab a drink before you fly up—brings a shimmering fade-in, Psychocandy-pretty guitar progression, and Jordan’s snarled, “Nobody else decides the way we scurry around this hell,” in a storm of chunky chords and kicks. “Agony Freak” has one of Ricochet’s catchiest choruses, and its mix gives Jordan’s voice ample room to skulk around the whirring guitars and fat basslines.

These are standouts on a record whose hooks mostly resemble half-baked echoes of harder-hitting ones in her discography, whose production washes out the dynamism in her voice, and whose yeah yeah and na na na outros sound like placeholders. On some level, Jordan’s impulse to take refuge in vagueness (sonic or otherwise) is understandable, considering how the achingly personal music that brought her acclaim when she was barely out of high school led to a tumultuous young adulthood in the public eye. Still, something feels missing.

On “Nowhere,” she hints at a fear of being cast aside in favor of the next wide-eyed wunderkind: “So much potential out there/Always gonna be someone to take your place.” It’s a tension worth exploring, and few contemporary songwriters are better equipped to tackle it than Jordan. She brings the idea up halfheartedly and abandons it before she can get under its surface. Knowing what she’s capable of, it’s impossible not to hear her holding back, whether that’s through her uneven lyricism or numbed-out production. The structure is there, but songs don’t bite like they used to.

At the beginning of her music career, Jordan was (rightfully) hailed as a prodigy—a blessing and a curse. Lush isn’t just a great debut, or a great record by a teenager—it’s a great record, full stop. What happens when a young musician is no longer precocious, when what once made them exceptional becomes the expectation? And what happens when an artist starts out influential, only to have everyone else catch up? In the mid-to-late 2010s, Snail Mail’s fuzzy garage rock sounded cutting edge; toss in some twang (as Ricochet does) and you’ve got the de facto sound of 2020s indie rock—just tune into any college radio station in America.

Not every entry in an artist’s catalog has to be a revelation; perhaps Ricochet’s pleasant filler is a necessary step in the evolution of Jordan’s artistry and the trajectory of Snail Mail as a band. “You can’t stop now, my little cliché,” she teases on the title track, swaddled in a soft, bright string arrangement. Ricochet inches towards conclusions about aging, mortality, career expectations, and the passage of time and usually comes up empty—a true-to-life outcome. Sometimes, all you can say about such massive, unknowable concepts is Damn, that’s crazy. To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.