The Idler Wheel...

The full title is The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. Like the title of When the Pawn..., it comes from a poem Apple wrote. She started recording in secret from Epic. Asked when, she said it must have started in 2008 or 2009, and she was not sure. This time she worked with her touring drummer Charley Drayton instead of Jon Brion. Epic's executives learned of the album in early 2012, when she presented it to them. She delayed the release until the label had a new president.

Epic released it on 19 June 2012, the day she began a North American tour in Ithaca, New York. The first single was Every Single Night, with a video directed by Joseph Cahill. A video for Hot Knife, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, followed on 24 July 2013, although the song was never issued as a single. The album reached three on the Billboard 200 with 72,000 copies in its first week, her highest debut, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. It has a Metacritic score of 89, AllMusic gave it five stars, and Rolling Stone ranked it 213th on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums.