Most artists lose their accents when they sing. Melody tends to override cadence and intonation, flattening vowel sounds into whatever the tune demands. Aldous Harding has been leaning in the opposite direction: melodies shaped by accent. It has unlocked something elemental in her craft. On her previous album, 2022’s Warm Chris, she sang with rounded Welsh vowels and the close-lipped muscularity of French, carrying her somewhere more playful and surreal than ever before. On “One Stop,” the first glimpse of her fifth album, Train on the Island, again produced with John Parish, she slips into a bevy of accents and modes of character-acting.
Harding sounds as though she is inventing the song form from scratch. Time signatures are thrown to the wind; an itchy fussiness skitters beneath the queasy piano lines. She commands an astonishing balance of disparate parts that somehow feels entirely seamless, veering between voices and melodic motifs. “I met the real John Cale/He didn’t have any words but I don’t mind,” she sings, turning an awkward encounter into comedy. It may be the funniest she has ever been.
She was right when she once called herself the Jim Carrey of the indie world. Her music feels like coming home drunk and making faces at yourself in the mirror, or pacing the kitchen in a Scottish accent after a long weekend alone. The magic of Aldous Harding is that she accesses the strange, playful part of being alive: the unselfconsciousness of a child, or of someone entirely alone, moving through pure feeling and nerves, compelled by some private tic. With “One Stop,” Harding invites us into her self-stimulatory world, where there are no mirrors and no one looking on with judgement.
