ALDOUS HARDING - Train On The Island

One voice, many voices: Aldous Harding's creative universe is a mystery box brimming with surprises. Elusive and ever-shifting. A collection of harmonic ideas and lyrical riddles in apparent contrast with one another. But it's just the latest mask that the New Zealand singer, now settled in Cardiff, waves in front of the unwary listener's eyes.

Aldous Harding has gradually earned an artistic status that transcends the cliché of the singer-songwriter with guitar, melancholy and uncertain sexual identity, achieving a more ambitious and successful staging halfway between tragicomic/theatrical poetics and an alt-pop-tinged nonchalance. It's no coincidence that John Parish is her loyal partner in crime in this rewriting of song structure: "Train On The Island" is yet another eccentric album that first wins your attention with dramatic tenderness, then goes on to stir the soul.

It only took the obsessive single "One Stop" to understand that this time Aldous Harding favours the unexpected: the shrill piano counterpoint only settles once the strumming of acoustic guitars turns the leaden atmosphere into a folk-pop romp, and that's just the beginning. H. Hawkline, Sebastian Rochford and Mali Llywelyn are the accomplices in this new sampler of alt-folk imagination and transgression. Each of the ten tracks is fertile ground for vocal and lexical mutations that in other hands would sound jarring and fleeting.

"Train On The Island" is also the New Zealand artist's most deceptively introspective record: the psychedelic nuances of the title track and the off-key chords of the brief, stripped-down "Riding That Symbol" are boundaries, but also starting points for unprecedented digressions.

Don't be surprised if "I Ate The Most" draws from the scrambled pages of the Radiohead's "Kid A", or if hints of jazz infect the nimble folk-pop framework of "If Lady Does It" to the point of blurring perception (as if Robert Wyatt were duetting with Emmylou Harris): nothing is as it seems in Aldous Harding's world.

There's no revolution on the New Zealand singer-songwriter's fifth album, but nothing ordinary either: even when she quotes herself on the intriguing "What Am I Gonna Do" (a darker take on "The Barrell"), the sonic sleights of hand are countless — the constant breaks with shifts in register, or the harp that eases the tension — and it's striking that it comes from the same hand that shortly before tried its hand at a delightful, lively bossa nova duet with H. Hawkline, "Venus In The Zinnia".

The enigmatic, at times surreal lyrics are an added value, and it's hard to tell whether it's this dazed poetic vision that gives rise to the songs' shifting moods. The mournful, aching voice resting on the pedal steel in the country-noir of "Worms", the shift from whisper to contralto that stirs the waters of "San Francisco" (almost a spin-off of "One Stop"), and the strange overlapping vocals on the record's most rock, but not too rock, track "Coats", are chapters of a single yet ever-changing story, the latest fruit of an artistic personality as extraordinary as it is understandable and intriguing — in other words, unique.

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17/05/2026