Alanis Morissette - Such Pretty Forks in the Road

Eight years after her previous album, Alanis Morissette returned with Such Pretty Forks in the Road, a piano-led, wide-open record about motherhood, mental health and the messy work of staying well.

Released in 2020, it finds her writing from a calmer, wiser place than the fury of Jagged Little Pill, without losing any of her candor. Producers Alex Hope and Catherine Marks give the songs plenty of space, building around piano before letting drums and guitars surge in when the emotion demands it.

Smiling, which she wrote for the Jagged Little Pill stage musical, opens the album and gives it its title, a portrait of someone keeping up appearances while everything wobbles underneath. Reasons I Drink is wry and brutally honest about the habits we lean on to cope, set to one of her catchiest melodies in years. Diagnosis tackles postpartum depression with startling tenderness, and Ablaze is a fierce lullaby of love for her children.

Her voice is as distinctive as ever, swooping and cracking in all the right places, and her lyrics still pack whole therapy sessions into a single verse.

For fans who grew up with her, this is the sound of an artist who kept asking the hard questions and found some hard-won answers along the way.