Aldous Harding – ‘Train On The Island’ review: enigmatic singer-songwriter delivers mercurial masterwork

Pressing play on a new Aldous Harding record for the first time is always an adventure. Since her self-titled debut, released in 2014, the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s work has become more inscrutable, each successive album more beguilingly weird. In that time, she appears to have stopped giving interviews – not that she was ever an especially obliging examiner of her own work to begin with – and has become equally enigmatic in her work, both lyrically and musically.

Harding’s previous record, 2022’s ‘Warm Chris’, seemed like it might have been the logical endpoint of her journey; gone was the drama of the songs she made her name with (‘Horizon’, ‘Imagining My Man’), in its place a strange little mid-tempo, folky world entirely in its maker’s image. Yet, as strange as it might sound, her latest project ‘Train On The Island’ might be the Aldous Harding album to please everybody.

Fans of ‘Warm Chris’ – and there were plenty, the album propelling her to the biggest rooms she’d ever played – will be pleased to discover that the playfulness has been retained, along with its soft way with melody and that stirring feeling of Harding’s songs unspooling languidly like daydreams. Those hoping for something a little more multi-faceted, though, like ‘Designer’ or ‘Party’ before it, will appreciate the experimental bent to ‘Train On The Island’.

There’s often abrupt stylistic shifts, sometimes even in the same song. That’s the case on lead single ‘One Stop’, a cryptic tale of Harding, who is based in Wales, meeting a local legend in The Velvet Underground’s John Cale – or did she? As if to accentuate the uncertainty, the song is part urgent piano pop, part jazzy shuffle. The undulating ‘What Am I Gonna Do?’ is a similarly mercurial highlight, interrupting a softly lilting pop soundscape by pulling the music away, allowing Harding to ask us the titular question over a piano loop, and then dropping us right back in where we left off.

It is exactly this kind of provocative songwriting, the subtle ways Harding introduces new ideas and rewrites her own rulebook, that elevates ‘Train On The Island’ to the level of other recent highlights of genuinely artful pop music; Fiona Apple’s ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’ and Julia Holter’s ‘Have You In My Wilderness’ both spring to mind. Nobody is making music quite like Harding, she is a special, singular artist. Just be sure to take the same approach to interpreting her lyrics as you would to any great work of surrealism; the joy is in the wondering, not the knowing.