New Zealand’s Aldous Harding is an idiosyncratic artist, whose work defies easy categorisation. Designer, her third record, is ambitious and ambiguous. Harding mixes common themes like anxiety, love, loss and hope, with far more opaque imagery. The braiding of hair, sitting in the back seat of a car as a child, a cold bangle on a wrist (seemingly representing humanity/the world), repeated references to shapes and the moulding of physical forms – lyrically, Designer is sometimes confusingly impressionistic, but it’s always poetic. Musically, I’ve seen Harding described as a ‘gothic’ singer-songwriter, but her work has far more light than that might suggest. I guess she is essentially playing in a toolbox that could be labelled ‘experimental folk’: multi-layered vocals, an acoustic guitar focus, but with various injections of brass or keys. Either way, Harding makes unusual music, supported by head-scratch-inducing videos and a persona (and overall approach) that’s shrouded in mystique. Great stuff: I heard nothing else that sounded like it in 2019.