Aldous Harding

Designer

It’s layered with whimsical flutes, intricate guitar picking and sombre bass lines that meander with casual abandon. At an age where the pressure is on to have everything worked out, Harding sounds delightfully free.

Designer is an album to be experienced, made to immerse yourself in, not to intellectualise.

Designer is an album of elegant contemplation, of confidence, doubt and longing, and as a result is Harding’s most assured album yet, taking a direct approach to its own arresting strangeness and making room for everyone within its singular and expansive shape.

Designer could be considered to be the second consecutive modern classic that Harding has released. Designer is disciplined despite its speedy gestation, thoughtful and reserved.

A singular talent, Harding seems to have hit her stride on album number three, and while the darkness of previous efforts is still pervasive, Designer feels like a summer record, though it's probably best suited for dusk.

A breath of fresh air in a time dense with noise and algorithmic hiss, this is an open-hearted deep dive into Aldous Harding’s colourful imagination.

Her lyrics are inscrutable and her vocal and visual stylings eccentric, but Harding’s third album is a thing of beauty.

Aldous Harding uses oddness as both lure and armor ... you can hear it in the language of Designer, her quizzically beautiful third LP, where she pivots artfully from folk eccentric to pop eccentric.

The third album from the impressionistic New Zealand singer-songwriter eludes easy classification, which makes her delicately built and beautifully rendered songs all the more alluring.

It is definitely the voice that is center-stage here, whether she is adopting an aviary croon or a mead-rich sing-speak that gives her a commanding confidence an air of detachment.

Despite what the album’s plain, monochromatic cover art might suggest, this is a warm, textured collection of songs that breathes life at every corner. A real triumph.

As previously, the rest of the record repays deep investment, as Harding’s pauses and supporting instrumental actors are often as significant as what’s going on up top, all creating a sense of tensile beauty as certain as physics but impossible to pin down.

‘Designer’ is a striking return, pursuing solitary aesthetic goals in a fashion both unrelenting and admirable.