It makes these ten tracks slightly less immediate, but just as moving. A wonderful, worthy follow-up.
Undeniably formulaic but just as captivatingly beautiful, solemn closer ‘Let Me Back In’ is the track-stopping highlight, painstakingly building to a crescendo before the ghost voices drift out. Glorious.
‘Smother’ does exactly what it suggests but with a poetic fragility and an exacting panache that enthrals and entices like never before. An essential album.
Wistful and plaintive, solemn yet blissful, these are songs from another time – if not another planet – and their mesmerising melodies have the powerful ability to transport you, temporally and spatially, into the band’s anachronistic, peaceful, eternal summer.
Gone is the ‘Primary Colours’ influences of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, or the punchy impatience of ‘Strange House’, and in that place stands an intellectually collective five-piece, fully immersed in the confidence of their own astonishing abilities.