Deaf Heat

Deaf Heat opens with the unflinchingly peculiar ‘Tongues’: darkly modulating harmonies bend two minutes into a bottomless eternity of human voices, cutting through hearts like ice.
Lead track ‘Deep Green’ thunders in after the ethereal strangeness of ‘Tongues’, imagining the body as a bag of bones or pile of shells: an unhappily disassociated sense of the self as utterly breakable and likely to drown. A chilling inevitability is evoked through the peculiar arrangements of disparate electronic melodies, chilling harmonies and a steady, determined drum track.
There’s a gentler feel to the opening of ‘Call off the dogs’, but the alarming sharp notes lurk around the corner, reminding us that these dogs do have teeth, after all.
And then she closes with an utterly winning Lykke Li cover, and you’re left desperate for an album that is more than likely to be a shadowy, complex paragon of excellence.