Tori Amos – In Times of Dragons
For as much as I have evangelized Tori Amos, her most diehard fans might accuse me of being a “casual,” merely enamored with the idea of her. Despite being one of the earliest adopters of her work, I stepped off of Amos’ carousel after 2001’s Strange Little Girls. It’s not because that recasting of songs written by men about women was in any way disappointing—I actually loved that album, especially her tender reading of Tom Waits’ “Time.” My ears simply ghosted her, I suppose, as shortly afterwards I began participating in media full of differently edgy indie and electronica sounds. So a quarter-century removed from my last targeted listens, I come to Amos’ newest LP In Times of Dragons in something of a critical vacuum.
These interceding years have found the North Carolina piano prodigy making more concept albums with particular thematic challenges. She’s spent this century embracing alter egos and children’s stories, hopping from Christmas carols to classical music, and incorporating history, religion, specific activities, and her own personal experiences. In Times of Dragons isn’t the first time Amos has placed herself in an only mildly fantastical setting, or addressed precarious political and social issues. What she does here that’s so striking is tell this story with as reserved and serious a voice as I’ve heard her muster, and while there’s plenty of symbolism she also plainly engages listeners and the antagonists using metaphor-free language, including some lifted directly from current events.
With her husband Mark Hawley playing and mixing in the studio, and their daughter Natashya as a cowriter and backup singer, the world-building for In Times of Dragons portrays Amos as a wife fleeing a controlling billionaire husband—“He separated me from me” is her artful accusation in “Tempest.” There’s dialogue quoted in album opener “Shush” that suggests the man is modeled after Palantir/PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. Really, the pair could be stand-ins for multiple modern couplings of inconvenience: Donald and Melania, Elon and Grimes, Fetterman v. Fetterman, or ultimately Lady Liberty or Blind Justice fending off any of a host of relevant, pervasive -archies and -isms. She uses “Angelshark” to invoke both camouflage and existential threats for her character and the like-minded: “We who choose love/Over greed/We are becoming/An endangered species.”
In a cross-country road movie for the mind, Amos recounts her protagonist’s interactions with rebellious locations and characters at least from Provincetown to New Orleans to Kansas. She does this with a lot less of the kind of octave-traversing and jaunty performances that helped define her. It’s not an album without humor or elation: ”Gasoline Girls” introduces the queer guardian angels of the escaping wife’s travels, and “Stronger Together” is her penultimate meeting with a character called Daughter. (Is it hers? Unclear!) But Amos largely seethes on In Times of Dragons, making her way through melodies like those of the title track, “Pyrite,” and “Song of Sorrow” with a growl steeped in women’s knowledge of and exhaustion with the patriarchy circa 2026.
Combined with the eerie atmospherics of album closer “23 Peaks”—implying the wife continued on to the Tetons—Amos’ vocal delivery throughout this story is revelatory. Her keyboard virtuosity also remains unchallenged, further propped up by many arrangements informed by the sleek, muted 1980s shimmer of music meant for Miami Vice. Amos’ 1991 breakthrough “Silent All These Years” gets a direct callback in “Shush,” implying that the main character’s getaway is high time to rediscover the power and volume of her voice. By telling a story based on timeless trends of speculative fiction with a dash of magical realism—The Grapes of Wrath to Parable of the Sower by way of The Wizard of Oz—Tori Amos appears to be finding out the same thing on In Times of Dragons.
Label: Decca
Year: 2026
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Tori Amos : In Times of Dragons
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