Tractor Beam

The title itself tells you where you are. A tractor beam, in science fiction, is an invisible force that locks you in place, holds you suspended against your will, or pulls you inexorably toward something you cannot resist. Lindsey Jordan opens Ricochet, her third album as Snail Mail, with exactly that kind of gravitational ambivalence: the pull between wanting to stay tethered and the longing to float free. It is, in the best sense, an opener that doubles as a thesis statement.

Five Years Between Albums

Ricochet arrives five years after Valentine (2021), and its gestation was anything but straightforward. In late 2021, Jordan underwent surgery to remove vocal cord polyps she had unknowingly carried since before Snail Mail existed. The growths had given her voice its characteristic roughness, and their removal required months of recovery and intensive speech therapy.^[1] She emerged with a wider, more flexible instrument and, by her own account, a fundamentally altered relationship to her voice and to herself.

Around the same time, she left New York City for Greensboro, North Carolina, drawn by affordability and quiet.^[5] She began a long-term relationship, took up acting (appearing in Jane Schoenbrun's surrealist horror film I Saw the TV Glow in 2024), and co-produced the new record with Aron Kobayashi Ritch, bassist of Momma, at Mitch Easter's studio in North Carolina.^[1] What emerged was an album no longer organized around romantic heartbreak. Jordan told The Line of Best Fit that misery had simply felt safe to write about before, and that she was no longer bathing in her own agony.^[2]

The new subject matter, broadly speaking, is existence itself: mortality, the passage of time, the terror of impermanence. A significant catalyst was Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York, which Jordan has described as triggering a severe OCD-adjacent fear of dying that shaped the entire record.^[2] "Tractor Beam" arrives at the opening of that album as both an introduction and a statement of terms.

The Feeling of Floating Away

Jordan has described the song as being about dissociation and alienation, specifically the experience of "feeling othered" while spending enormous energy figuring out how to float away from the world.^[2] This is not the dramatic dissociation of crisis. It is the more diffuse, everyday estrangement: the sensation of watching your own life from a slight distance, of existing in a body and a place while some part of you drifts perpetually elsewhere.

The song's lyrical content moves through what amounts to a spiritual inventory, contemplating the self as a temporary container. The narrator articulates a felt distance from the physical body, rendering the material frame as something separate from whatever "I" actually means. It is an old question, one that has occupied philosophers and mystics for centuries, but Jordan addresses it in language that sits comfortably in a guitar-pop song rather than a seminar room. That accessibility is part of the point.

What makes "Tractor Beam" work is the tonal balance between its subject and its sound. Critics have described it as "light-hearted" and sonically bright, driven by jangly, luscious guitars in a power-pop style with clear debts to 1990s alt-rock touchstones, particularly The Sundays.^[3] The music does not signal distress. It signals someone who has arrived at a kind of peace with the feeling it describes. A tractor beam does not destroy what it holds. It simply suspends it.

A New Kind of Snail Mail Song

On Snail Mail's first two records, the emotional territory was sharply defined: the devastation of early romantic loss on Lush (2018), and a more complicated grief on Valentine (2021), which arrived after Jordan's time in a rehabilitation facility and a period of profound personal difficulty. The title track "Ricochet" deals with the broader existential questions at the album's core, but "Tractor Beam" is where the shift from Jordan's earlier mode announces itself most cleanly. The alienation here is not located in a relationship. It is located in the self's relationship to being alive at all.

Jordan's vocal surgery also informs the song in ways that go beyond biography. After losing her familiar instrument and having to relearn how to use it, she had an intimate encounter with the idea of the self as provisional.^[4] The voice is usually understood as the most personal thing a singer possesses. Having it altered, not initially by choice and then eventually by procedure and months of therapy, would prompt deep questions about the relationship between the inner self and the body that carries it. "Tractor Beam" addresses precisely that theme. The new voice that opens Ricochet is not the same instrument that carried Valentine, and the song's meditation on bodily estrangement takes on additional resonance when you know that context.

Generational Resonance

"Tractor Beam" speaks to something beyond one person's experience. Dissociation, understood as the impulse to unhook from the demands of an overwhelmingly connected world, has become a near-universal idiom for millennial and Gen Z experience. The pressure to perform a coherent self across multiple platforms simultaneously, to stay fully present when presence feels expensive, has made the sensation of floating away recognizable across an entire generation.

What Jordan does with this terrain is refuse the clinical frame. The song does not pathologize its subject's dissociation or present floating away as a failure of willpower or a symptom to be managed. The tractor beam is not a disorder. It is, at worst, physics: a force operating on you, holding you in a particular relationship to your own life. And in the song's emotional logic, learning to name that force is already a kind of freedom.

Alternative Readings

One reading of the song positions it as a meditation on spiritual dislocation. Jordan was raised Catholic, and Ricochet as an album grapples with what remains of faith when the structure that housed it has eroded.^[2] The imagery of a self yearning to leave its vessel behind, to float free of its frame, carries genuine theological echoes. This reading positions "Tractor Beam" as a kind of secular prayer, or the space where prayer used to be.

Another reading connects the song to Jordan's acting work. I Saw the TV Glow is explicitly about the gap between the self one inhabits and the self one has been assigned, using surrealist horror to explore dissociation and the failure of identity to cohere. Having performed in that film, Jordan would have spent considerable time thinking about what it means to embody a character, to exist as a vessel for a role. "Tractor Beam" carries some of that residue: the idea that one might feel held in place by forces, whether identity, expectation, or history, that seem to originate outside rather than within.

An Opening Worth the Weight

"Tractor Beam" earns its position at the front of Ricochet because it articulates the album's central emotional logic in miniature. The feeling of being held suspended, not quite arrived, aware of forces larger than yourself but not destroyed by them: that is the territory of the whole record. Jordan has arrived at something resembling peace with not having answers. The song does not resolve so much as it hovers. And the hovering, it turns out, is the point.

It is a graceful statement of intent from a songwriter who spent her first two records learning to describe pain with extraordinary precision. Ricochet begins by suggesting there are other things worth describing. One of them is the strange, quiet relief of letting yourself float.