Available on: True Panther LP

Glasser sounds like a force of nature on the opening track of her debut album, ‘Apply’. The track features a slightly distorted vocal which sounds twice as big as any of the instruments beneath it, becoming almost unbearably strong as it rises higher and higher, defining one of the best album openers you’ll hear for ages. She starts off with these huge, distorted screams. Then she yelps. Then, she sings the word “morning” in this plaintive, consoling way and you’re by now totally disoriented; what am I supposed to feel?

There’s a wider variety of instrumentation on this record than initially appears apparent. ‘T’ contains this warm, sliding synth which sounds like something from Ratatat, while ‘Mirrorage’ features a menacing, warped vocal effect that appears suddenly in the middle of its minimal sparseness, bringing in a sudden outburst of contempt. On ‘Glad’, you’ll find a far-eastern string refrain and warm, fuzzy bass and, I think, some sort of kazoo – it’s not all cold, icey wistfulness here. Every song is very tightly constructed and produced; ‘Treasury of We’ has a frantic xylophone trilling up and down its verse but it never sounds out of control.

You can tell that Ring was made by one person; all the instruments are in perfect accordance with one another, and the standard never really slips; each song is like its own self-contained work of wonder. Virtually every track also contains a thirty second chaotic ambient coda at the end. Glasser seems very fond of that; a bit of mess after the pop. The tracks never really repeat themselves in the way some solo albums can; instead, Glasser moves on and does something different with each and every song. It is a genuine album; a collection of songs which mesh together well but are individually valid, all saying something different. It’s good to see it’s not just Joanna Newsom still doing this.

The one constant throughout all the songs is that they will at some point give way to Glasser’s wild “ohhh” vocals, which sweep like a wind through the album’s course. Whenever Glasser gets too close to pop or singer-songwriter tweeness, this great leveller comes through and flattens everything down again. It’s that whole force of nature thing again; she sounds powerful beneath and in between the cracks in her own songs.

It took me a while to find a place for this album in my life but I soon began to listen to it out of habit and days didn’t feel right unless they included some Glasser. It soon became my answer to the ‘what have you been listening to lately?’ question, and the most important new music I’ve heard for a while. At the end of the Ring, you even understand the ambient coda thing and the meaning of the album’s title – the final track, ‘Clammor’, closes on the drum intro to the album’s opener. A self-contained work of wonder indeed then.

James Hampson