So, How's The New Tori Amos Album?

Dead Teenagers #3 is out now at your comic shop and the usual digital retailers. Catch up and get ready for Dead Teenagers #4 on June 17.

In the meantime, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is still available, in both book and smell form. You can also pre-order Be Not Afraid, which will be out in collected edition in July.

Then, on July 8, the Summer of Goo begins with Clayface: Celebrity Dirt.

First things first: It’s 2026. I thought, by this point, that we all knew what we were getting into with a new Tori Amos album. There will be concepts. There will be characters. The press release is going to lead with a quote that goes “in this album, my character is a lesbian vampire who discovers that Peter Thiel has been pissing in her coffee maker,” and before you can ask “but why does a vampire even need a coffee maker,” you will learn that there’s a song from the coffee maker’s perspective that is a nine-minute reggaeton/doo-wop medley and which will actually turn out to be most poignant thing you’ve ever heard in your life. 

You will cry to the coffee maker song, and you will tell no-one, because this is Tori Amos. She once recorded a duet with her nine-year-old about doing peyote, and it was set to the music of Chopin. You never need to ask how weird things are going to get, with a new Tori Amos album, because the answer is: Very. She’s a brilliant woman, and she saved my life — as she has the lives of many others — but she has never once done it without being A Little Extra. 

So when you review the new Tori Amos album, all the Extra bits — the concepts, the characters, the Evelyn Normielib revenge ballads; the revelation that her new best friend is a Huffington Post writer who channeled the ancient Celtic deity Lugh of the Long Arm to give her advice on how to write the album, including (presumably) the advice that she should definitely include a song about how great it is to be friends with a Huffington Post writer who has magic powers (note: if I were friends with Tori Amos, I would definitely do this) — you kinda just factor that in, right? That’s what the people are buying. That’s what a Tori Amos album is for. 

That’s what I thought, but then the Ghost of Pitchfork reared its crusty head out of the basement to deliver this: 

With 17 songs and a long runtime, In Time of Dragons is a reminder that Tori Amos has never shied away from self-indulgence… [The songs on the album] do not feel fully developed, and they suffer from the same literalism that affects much politically reactive art today.