Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young woman. Her politics are, as you might have guessed, banal and stupid. She has been in a relationship with the ghastly Matty Healy of the 1975.
But she has huge talent and is probably a more interesting musician than any other we have right now, if we’re just talking pop music.
She exists just beyond the Kuiper Belt of digital, alternative rhythm and blues, where pop meets modern classical. The conventional description is “art pop,” but as that brings to mind 10cc I think we’d better move on. Her songs, or her approach to songs, recall mid-period Bjork.
They also teeter rather wonderfully into the choral (as on the title track), what was once called Krautrock, soul, prog and the electro-minimalist.
The crucial thing is that while the electronics are fecund, wildly imaginative and very much not rooted in either the usual landfill electronic dance music or, for that matter, rhythm and blues, they never dominate the songs but instead serve them, adding a cleverly confusing undercurrent to some really quite sublime melodies.
This is true in the echoing guitars of “Wanderlust,” the A.G. Cook-ish stomp of “Drums of Death” and the rather lovely Erik Satie-ish, piano-driven track “Sticky.”
Every song has a melodic point to it: this is pop music, essentially conservative — and yet it seems from another genre, another planet, altogether.
Beauty runs through this album and it is certainly her best yet. The lyrics? Forget them. Just enjoy a unique sound and hope she wises up about Palestine. And everything else.