After seven years of total silence, Fiona Apple has finally reemerged to make the big, brassy entrance we’ve been waiting for. Her rapturous new album The Idler Wheel drops tomorrow, and the singer has added a second leg to her summer tour. She’ll stage her return at San Jose’s Civic Auditorium on September 9th.

The Idler Wheel is the intense and plangent offering that you’d expect from the wide-eyed Apple, the girl with the grudge who grew into a woman with a sense of humor, maybe reading a lot of Sylvia Plath along the way. She caved under the furious discomfort of the public spectacle, then hid, reappearing now with an album that isn’t cautious or pigeon-toed, but wild, terrifying, almost bullying you with its grim passions.

With an ambitious fifty dates scheduled, Apple’s siren song is getting more shrill and courageous with time. And a bit more studied: the shaky, carnal throes bleed into the blackest of humor, springing from an imagination both nightmarish and serene – the quiet before the storm, over and over again. The piano bangs, the voice quivers. If there’s a spectacle on September 9th, let it be mutual.

Tickets for Fiona Apple’s September 9th show at the San Jose Civic Auditorium go on sale at 10 am Friday, June 22 at Ticketmaster.

It’s a travesty that as of this morning, there are only 162 comments on the new Fiona Apple single “Every Single Night”, posted three days ago to her SoundCloud page. Looking to flood your respective social media channels with something? Look no further: let the oversharing commence.

This isn’t as dreamy or grandstanding as the early stuff, though stylistically similar – but it is better. “Every Single Night” is a gentle lullaby with an ominous, immediate shade cast over it. Her voice convulses, there’s a chorus, she readjusts into an unsettling serenade, something is not right.

Why do we have so much hope in our hearts for the not-so-young Ms. Apple? The binary personality of a strong female pop persona: fragile and scalding, but so often unmoored and screaming in the wind, unapologetic about her strange desires – this itself will not surprise. Is feminism about choosing things? What has Fiona Apple chosen?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Maybe we prefer our women this way. Maybe Lana Del Rey, with her prepackaged and retrofitted sexuality, actually bores us. Fiona, like Tori Amos, feels like an open wound. And that strikes us as art.

Fiona Apple plays the Fox Theater in Oakland on July 28th. Tickets are sold out.