Ella Williams begins her third album as Squirrel Flower with the song “i don’t use a trash can,” a reverb-soaked, stark anecdote about being completely transfixed by someone. The song makes it clear that Williams hones in on her strengths with her latest album, “Tomorrow’s Fire.” The release features fluttering plucked electric guitars and vivid confessions of how Williams is “not gonna change [her] sheets,” following the warm, folk-oriented songcraft of her 2021 album “Planet (i).” It would be misleading to say that these qualities are new, as “i don’t use a trash can” was originally released in 2015 and was re-recorded for “Tomorrow’s Fire.” To make her richest album yet, Williams had to reexamine where she first found her voice as a songwriter.
“Tomorrow’s Fire” is Squirrel Flower’s most mesmerizing work. It’s a sweltering record that owes a lot to its atmosphere — strong, noisy shoegaze of the ’90s that centers Williams’ voice as both a lyricist and someone who clearly knows how to rock. Only a few minutes into the album, listeners are faced with “Full Time Job,” which opens with fuzzed-out, crunchy guitar chords. In under two minutes, the song details feelings of economic pressures and thinking about the future. “Full Time Job” is filled with the kind of witticisms that pop up throughout Squirrel Flower’s discography. In the song, Williams throws some deadpan humor our way — “Doing my best is a full time job / But it doesn’t pay the rent” — right as the drums drop in, upping the ante. It’s the rare song that’s enveloped in a sea of fuzz but still manages to be truly infectious, maintaining a wonderful melodic hook.
In an interview with Last Donut of the Night, Williams said that she “heard all of these songs that felt like classic rock songs” when writing “Tomorrow’s Fire.” There is a touch of Neil Young’s albums with his backing band Crazy Horse, especially in the guitar tone on a song like “Stick.” There’s even a little psychedelic rock ambience with the album’s thumping drums and bass tones.
With “Stick,” Williams manages to pair a “Zuma”-level tune with direct, vulnerable sentiments: “Gave you my heart and you stopped it / I had a light / I laid down a stick and you crossed it.” With its grinding, heavy groove — an ideal soundtrack for a suffocatingly hot day — and the haunted half-time ending, Williams crafts one of the best songs of the year.
On the heartland rock of “Alley Light,” Williams spins her best tale on the album. It’s a song filled with Midwestern iconography of unsatisfied lovers, scratch tickets and beat-up cars. Sitting somewhere between a version of John Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow” about a faltering relationship and a downbeat rewriting of Tom Petty’s “Refugee” without the organ, “Alley Light” takes the images of yesteryear’s classic rock and makes them uniquely tragic. To mention Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” would be too obvious — Williams already did it herself. “Will she find another man who can take her there / When my drive burns out?” she ponders openly, with her harmonies providing a thick backing to her bummed-out questions.
Best of all, “Alley Light” never feels like an imitation of any of the aforementioned influences. That quality also encapsulates why “Tomorrow’s Fire” is one of the year’s best albums — it features music created through the lens of all of the music that Williams loves. To craft a song that’s truly transcendent, you have to look toward what you love. It could be anything. It could be any of Williams’ biggest inspirations: the composer Arthur Russell, the poet Mary Oliver, her great-grandfather’s writing. But as “i don’t use a trash can” tells the listener, you can always look back at an older version of yourself and find something new.
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