Pressing play on a new Aldous Harding record for the first time is always an adventure. Since her self-titled debut, released in 2014, the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s work has become more inscrutable, each successive album more beguilingly weird. In that time, she appears to have stopped giving interviews – not that she was ever an especially obliging examiner of her own work to begin with – and has become equally enigmatic in her work, both lyrically and musically.

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Harding’s previous record, 2022’s ‘Warm Chris’ , seemed like it might have been the logical endpoint of her journey; gone was the drama of the songs she made her name with (‘Horizon’, ‘Imagining My Man’), in its place a strange little mid-tempo, folky world entirely in its maker’s image.…