Maple Glider I Get Into Trouble

For Tori Zietsch, who records under the moniker Maple Glider, music has been an escape from a series of oppressive institutions: religion, enervating relationships, her own brain. At 14, Zietsch freed herself from her restrictive and deeply limited religious upbringing and at 15—after learning to play guitar from a chord book—she played her first show, at a skatepark. After touring the open mic scene in Brisbane, moving to the UK, and returning to Melbourne, she released her critically lauded debut album To Enjoy is the Only Thing in 2021, which Rolling Stone described as “one of the most accomplished debut albums in recent years.” Ultimately, I Get Into Trouble is the sound of alchemized pain. In each song, Zietsch transmutes tribulation and confusion into clarity and deep insight. She embraces the opportunity to be plainly and painfully honest. The album is a thematic expansion of her debut, going into greater and clearer detail, as she delves back into her Christian childhood while deconstructing her relationship to her body and her sexuality, alongside concepts of consent and shame. Throughout the songs, she draws similar parallels between religion and sexuality in novelistic detail, before landing on a note of hopeful optimism, and embracing a new life of peacefulness. She deftly combines the infectious folk-pop hooks of her debut with a sense of scape and scope. It’s tight in all the right places, free-form, wiley and compositionally eclectic, playful, and erratic in others.