Tori Amos - In Times of Dragons
The 18th album from the 12 million-selling songwriter frames a fractured nation as an allegorical battlefield of power and resistance
Tori Amos has never been one to whisper when the world is on fire. On In Times of Dragons, her 18th studio album, the singer-songwriter turns the volume all the way up — not just musically, but thematically — delivering one of the most politically charged and narratively ambitious works of her long career.
Released today via Universal/Fontana, In Times of Dragons arrives framed as an allegory but lands with the weight of lived reality. At its center is a fictionalized Amos: a woman trapped in a marriage to a powerful and dangerous billionaire, who ultimately escapes and embarks on a cross-country odyssey through a fractured America. It’s a story filled with menace, resistance, and unlikely alliances — and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where fiction bleeds into commentary.
“This is a metaphorical story about the fight for democracy over tyranny,” Amos says. “We really don’t know how this American experiment is going to end up.”
That tension — between uncertainty and defiance — pulses through the album. The opening track, “Shush,” begins with ominous piano chords that feel almost claustrophobic, as Amos’ protagonist recognizes the danger closing in around her. From there, the record unfolds like a slow-burning transformation myth. By the time the title track arrives, she’s no longer running — she’s evolving, stepping into something more powerful, something necessary. A dragon.
If that sounds grandiose, that’s because it is — and deliberately so. Amos has always thrived in the space between the intimate and the mythic, but In Times of Dragons pushes that balance further than she has in decades. Critics have already noted its resonance with her revered ’90s work, though this album feels less like a return and more like a reckoning.
There’s also a deeply personal thread running through the narrative. Amos’ daughter, Natashya Hawley, co-writes and appears on several tracks, most notably “Veins,” a haunting call-and-response that interrogates generational inheritance — not just of trauma, but of responsibility. It’s one of the album’s emotional anchors, grounding the larger allegory in something unmistakably human.
Elsewhere, the cast of characters expands the world Amos is building. The “Gasoline Girls,” a rebellious collective who “tend the fire,” offer both refuge and resistance, embodying a communal strength that contrasts with the isolation of the album’s opening act. These moments give the record a sense of movement — not just geographically, but ideologically.
For an artist more than 35 years into her career, Amos sounds remarkably unrestrained here. The arrangements shift between stark piano minimalism and more expansive, almost cinematic textures, mirroring the protagonist’s journey from confinement to confrontation. There’s anger in these songs, but also clarity — and, at times, a flicker of something like hope.
Or maybe not hope. Something sharper than that.
Amos has described herself as neither an optimist nor a fatalist, and In Times of Dragons reflects that uneasy middle ground. It doesn’t offer easy answers, nor does it pretend the outcome is certain. What it does offer is a call — urgent, unignorable — to pay attention.
The album arrives ahead of Amos’ largest European tour in over a decade, where she’ll be joined by longtime collaborators Jon Evans and Earl Harvin, along with a trio of backing vocalists. Expect the new material to sit alongside career-spanning favorites — though if In Times of Dragons proves anything, it’s that Amos isn’t interested in nostalgia for its own sake.
She’s still pushing forward. Still telling stories that cut a little too close. Still asking the kinds of questions most artists eventually stop asking.
And on In Times of Dragons, she’s not just raising her voice.
She’s breathing fire.
Official website of Tori Amos.
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