Tidal (album)
1996 studio album by Fiona Apple
Tidal is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple, released on July 23, 1996, by The WORK Group. Tidal produced three singles: "Shadowboxer", "Sleep to Dream", and "Criminal". The last was the album's most popular single, winning a Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance in 1998. In 2017, Tidal got its first vinyl run as a "Vinyl Me Please" exclusive "Record of the Month".
Background
In 1995, Los Angeles music producer Andy Slater signed Apple under the Work Group, a Sony Music label. Upon meeting her, he thought a prank was being pulled on him after seeing how, Apple, a visibly young woman, wrote much of her early work, stating that he thought "it was a Milli Vanilli thing." Later commenting in 2000 on what became Tidal, Apple said that the album "was more for the sake of proving myself; telling people from my past something. And to also try to get friends for the future."
Critical reception
Tidal garnered generally positive reviews from contemporary music critics, with Jenny Eliscu of Rolling Stone and Richard Harrington of The Washington Post describing it as a mature effort comparable to the work of artists Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. In a more negative review, The Sydney Morning Herald found the album to be produced out of a "gender cliché," specifically criticizing the lyricism of the track "Criminal" to be too "fragile."
Retrospective reviews have lauded the album. In a 2017 Pitchfork review by Jenn Pelly, Tidal was described as lyrically stating "You could never feel the pain I feel because only I have felt it. There are things about me that you can't see at all, because I have buried them so well.
“Tidal (album)” enters the record as 1996 studio album by Fiona Apple. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tidal, album and studio can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q847595. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1998, 2017 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tidal (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.