Baby, Torres Is Gonna Write Lusty Pop Music That Lasts

Pop music has its expected moves, its reliable strategies to get a musical payoff by making the melody's apex the main event. Torres isn't interested in reserving her intensity for the high notes. She engineered the chorus of "Don't Go Puttin' Wishes In My Head," a muscled-up power-pop song on her ravishing fifth album, Thirstier, so that it has a dramatically shifting center of gravity. Mackenzie Scott — the singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and producer behind the moniker — leaps up to deliver reedy bursts of syllables, then plunges into guttural gravitas an octave below, repeating the vocal maneuver a couple of times more. She attacks the melody heartily in her upper and lower registers alike, which gives her delivery a vertiginous quality. And for her, it works.

The fact that a Torres song can be said to have a robust hook at all marks a greater upending of expectations. For her first four albums — the initial one self-titled and self-released and the rest on a rotating cast of indie labels — she worked from a posture that seemed at once contemplative and oppositional. "I definitely have a lot of that in me, that resistance to