Into The Music
Aldous Harding makes music that you notice has gotten under your skin before you can explain how. The New Zealand singer and songwriter has been releasing records since 2014, each one more assured and stranger than the last, and she has built a following of people who will describe her to anyone who will listen and still struggle to find the right words.
This week she announced Train on the Island, her fifth album, due May 8 on 4AD. It reunites her with producer John Parrish, who has been a crucial collaborator since Warm Chris in 2022. The lead single and video, “One Stop,” is out now, and it is exactly what her music always is: a song that operates simultaneously as something very simple and something very strange. She performs abstract dance in a giant metal tub in the video. This is not a joke. It works completely.
The album features an ensemble that includes pedal steel, harp, synth, and drums from Sebastian Rochford, and on bass, vocals, guitar, and organ, Huw Evans of H. Hawkline. The collaborators say something about how Harding works: she builds worlds rather than records, gathering the specific textures and voices that the music seems to require.
Her 2019 album Designer was the record that broke her into a wider conversation, a collection of theatrical, carefully constructed songs delivered in multiple voices, alternating between sweetness and something darker and harder to place. Warm Chris continued that development, winning year-end list placements and a level of critical attention that her earlier work, just as good, did not quite receive.
What sets Harding apart is a quality that is genuinely difficult to name. She writes about specific emotional experiences with a precision that feels almost clinical, and then delivers them in ways that are theatrical and physical and almost demanding. Her performances, live and on record, feel inhabited rather than performed. There is not a note of her catalog that sounds like it was made by anyone other than exactly her.
Train on the Island is already one of the most anticipated folk and art-pop releases of the spring. The Pitchfork most-anticipated albums list describes it as operating “at both extremes,” wading through childhood memories, incels, and encounters with John Cale, with Parrish weaving “a wicker basket of folk rock that feels capacious enough to hold all of Harding’s contradictions.”
That is pretty much exactly right. May 8 cannot come soon enough.