Tori Amos released In Times of Dragons

In Times of Dragons Tori Amos

Released: May 1, 2026 Peak: -- US, -- UK, -- CN, -- AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- US, -- UK, -- world (includes US and UK) Genre: alternative rock/singer-songwriter

Tracks: Shush [6:15] (3/24/2026, --) In Times of Dragons [4:50] Provincetown [5:06] St. Teresa [6:19] Gasoline Girls [2:56] (4/14/2026, --) Ode to Minnesota [1:34] Fanny Faudrey [1:47] Veins [3:59] Strawberry Moon [4:10] Song of Sorrow [6:19] Flood [4:03] Pyrite [3:34] Tempest [5:18] Angelshark [3:47] Blue Lotus [6:03] Stronger Together [3:14] (2/24/2026, --) 23 Peaks [6:42] Black Is the New Black * * HMV exclusive with bonus track Total Running Time: 75:56

Rating: 3.227 out of 5.00 (average of 9 ratings)

The Struggle with the Devil “If Tori Amos’ enormous back catalog could be reduced to a single throughline, it would be her struggle with the devil…Up until her 2017 album, Native Invader, Satan stood in for an amalgam of everything malign…But in her most recent three albums, Satan takes on his most particular form yet: our present autocracy and oligarchy, embodied in the most overdetermined example of the trickster archetype, Donald Trump.” PF He “is a very convenient character…The difficulty is that writing about him can feel almost too convenient.” PF “Amos is prone to metaphors – and In Times of Dragons is a metaphorical story about the fight for democracy as tyranny threatens to take over.” PP “So why not take up the language of fantasy and meet them on their own Tolkien-fixated terms?” JZ She “casts Trump and his tech-feudalist allies as reptilian dragons” PF and “herself as both dragon slayer and dragon, torn between heroic impulses and the same traits she criticizes: greed and a violent appetite for luxury, which she links to Trump and to the ills of the present day.” PF The Narrative She said, “I wanted to document this time in our history. And I think artists are called to do different things, different projects at different times, and to express it in different ways...And the question was, ‘How am I going to tell this story?' I needed to tell it as a narrative.’” PP “The narrative here is about a woman – a fictional version of Amos herself – who took an alternate path. Instead of marrying sound engineer Mark Hawley, with whom she shares daughter Tash, 25, the album version of Amos married a powerful billionaire lizard king.” PP She said,”I had some options back in the ‘90s that weren’t just rock stars or musicians or roadies. There were some options. So I investigated in my mind, ‘What if I married one of the billionaires?’” PP The Songs “The songs are generally rich and full of character, populated by her usual cast of gay witches, Southern Baptist girls, medicine women, saints, and pre-Christian gods. But these figures do not feel fully developed, and they suffer from the same literalism that affects much politically reactive art today.” PF Conclusion “Tyranny, Amos knows, is not something which can be shut off by the flick of a switch. In every philosophy and every person there is a door which leads to evil, but all of us have the power to keep the door closed and the darkness at bay. And, in times such as these, a work of art as accomplished, as beautiful, and as generous as In Times of Dragons is a very bright light indeed.” JZ “Unfortunately, even in the album’s best moments, In Time of Dragons pales against Amos’ early work.” PF Her later releases have “slipped from that exceptional, best-in-class level.” PF This “is a decent entry in her catalog, but by no means essential.” PF The Songs Here’s a breakdown of the individual songs.

Shush Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “The haunting track that opens the album, Shush,” PP “crudely demands attention.” PF It “is just as provocative as some of the songs that made her a sensation more than 30 years ago when she released Little Earthquakes.” PP “The ever-fantastic Matt Chamberlain plays a heavy wallop of gut-rumbling drums which Amos pairs with a piano line reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral era in its descending, tortile intensity, even as it remains unmistakably marked by Amos’ densely worked, surging runs. Her voice, now lowered and roughened by age, serves the material well, adding a grain that makes the track feel genuinely unsettled.” PF “But the bluntness of the lyrics arrives just as quickly, undercutting the atmosphere by naming too plainly what the music had already begun to evoke with greater force.” PF Tori “quotes her character’s ‘sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband’ over somnolent, thudding beats: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’” JZ “In the real world, this statement stands as the guiding principle of the far-right Dark Enlightenment movement, which underpins contemporary forms of evil from Trump’s nationalist monarchism to Silicon Valley’s reckless, relentless accelerationism.” JZ

Provincetown Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “The panoramic Provincetown” JZ is “the greatest Amos return to form.” PF It “marks the thrilling reappearance of the harpsichord, an instrument that hasn’t featured in Amos’ work since her 1996 masterpiece, Boys for Pele. Here, it sounds less feral and much more controlled…its clipped decay leaving space for the forceful bass and drums, while adding an ornate and highly structured prog-rocky layer.” PF It “might move at a restrained pace, but as Amos spiels through a list of mythical characters helping the album’s heroine on her flight across America, its fizzing harpsichordy tones and melodic bass-guitar yawns step in groovy tandem until you can feel the earth scrolling beneath her feet.” JZ

Gasoline Girls Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “You don’t need to share Amos’s chromesthesia (she experiences music as colour and light) to get a sense of the rainbow-hued spell which Gasoline Girls casts. With the jazzy melody flickering up and down as if it’s trying to jump off the piano, trying to follow its breathtaking leaps and dives feels like trying to catch a stream between your fingers.” JZ

Fanny Faudrey Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “Showcasing her undimmed piano skills just as cheerfully, music hall knees-up Fanny Faudrey reminds us with a jolt that this is the same Tori Amos who twice covered Chas & Dave. As she rattles off a rollicking tale of escape sweetened further by singalong-ready backing vocals, it’s hard to resist joining in.” JZ

Pyrite Tori Amos & Natashya Hawley

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “If the record wasn’t eclectic enough, the wriggling funk of Pyrite and the secluded trip hop of ‘Blue Lotus’ prove there’s something for everyone here.” JZ

Blue Lotus Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: Blue Lotus, “the album’s best song,” PF “sounds like a mix between Boys for Pele and Amos’ 2005 album, The Beekeeper…She errs closer to the instrument’s origins, playing baroque filigrees against a warm and sustained Rhodes accompaniment.” PF

Ode to Minnesota Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “Amos never loses sight of her mission statement, and on Ode to Minnesota she breaks from the worldbuilding to make a brief but wrought-iron gesture of solidarity. She knows as well as anyone that the only way to defeat isolation is through connection.” JZ

Veins Tori Amos & Natashya Hawley

Writer(s): Tori Amos, Natashya Hawley Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: Dragons takes “on a particularly intimate air whenever she duets with her daughter Tash.” JZ The two had collaborated before, but now as a law student, Tash “brings a unique viewpoint.” PP Tori said, “She’s hearing lectures, law professors talking about the seriousness of our time…So…she’s under no illusions about the knife edge we’re on.” PP “‘Can a gift be born out of poison?’ they ask plaintively, voices soaring up in frittering harmony, over the squirming piano of Veins. Never mind the Anglo-German pun – any mother who has had a child by a tyrant will recognise the pain of that question.” JZ

Strawberry Moon Tori Amos & Natashya Hawley

Writer(s): Tori Amos, Natashya Hawley Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “Strawberry Moon is another remarkably tender mother-and-daughter duet, the instrumentation slowly growing beneath a spare exoskeleton of piano as the catch of passion in Amos’s voice reaches up towards her daughter’s incantatory repetition of the title. She’s been compared to Kate Bush more times than anyone can count, but in the sleekly weeping, almost classical bass that surfaces again and again throughout In Times of Dragons the ghost of The Ninth Wave – the enchanting prog-pop suite which makes up Hounds of Love’s second side – feels particularly present.” JZ

St. Teresa Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “On synth-pop hymn St. Teresa, her production is less redolent of Kate Bush than it is of her collaborator Peter Gabriel. Individual notes of piano, guitar, synthesiser, and percussion are set flying free over a rumbling savannah-sized setting while she repeats the lyrics as if praying to herself, her voice growing ragged at the edges with breathy intensity.” JZ

Tempest Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “’St. Teresa’ is not the only track on this record to call on a saint. A plea to St. Cecilia, Tempest affirms the power of music as a feminist force with the repeated refrain taking on the texture of a liturgy over its lavishly neoclassical backdrop.” JZ

Song of Sorrow Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos, Natashya Hawley Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “When In Times of Dragons has answers to offer, it finds them not in God but in humanity. Song of Sorrow is a grandly orchestral ballad about the weight of grief and the catharsis of sharing it, with the plain and heartfelt feeling in Amos’s delivery and the dark notes of threat in the piano ensuring that it is always beautiful and never histrionic.” JZ

Angelshark Tori Amos

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: “Amos is never sentimentally complacent about compassion, recognising its fragility in the face of self-interest and hatred. ‘We who choose love over greed,’ she sings on stark warning Angelshark, ‘we are becoming an endangered species.’” JZ

Stronger Together Tori Amos & Natashya Hawley

Writer(s): Tori Amos Released: In Times of Dragons Peak: -- Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: Amos duets with her daughter, Tash, on Stronger Together, the album’s first single. Tori said of the song, “That's the sunniest you’re going to get. It goes pretty dark.” PP “It’s easy to assume ‘Stronger Together’ is its finale. Another affecting letter from mother to daughter, building to a gently joyous climax with no fantasy tropes in sight, it glows with optimism and leaves you feeling that the battle has been won.” JZ

“23 Peaks”

“But then 23 Peaks suggests that all may not be well forever. Layers on layers of glassy ambient synth redolent of Brian Eno’s most mournful work ring out over the top of a great natural hum, as if you’re listening to the Earth breathe. It would be affecting even as an instrumental, but now we find Amos, in a voice which suddenly sounds as though it has lived through an epoch of suffering, reckoning with the terrible possibility of becoming the very same creature she has tried to evade until the song and the album are at last swallowed by the huge hopeful glow of an organ.” ^JZ

Resources/References: JZ Joyzine.org (5/1/2026) album review by Poppy Bristow PP People (5/1/2026). “Tori Amos on her New Album… by Eric Andersson PF Pitchfork (4/30/2026) album review by Emma Madden Related DMDB Pages: First posted 5/2/2026.