Warm Chris, released in March 2022, is the record where Aldous Harding stopped making music that was merely strange and started making music that was strange in a more specific and controlled way. The New Zealand songwriter has always operated in territory that resists description, and this album found her more confident in that resistance than ever.

Harding’s previous record, Designer, announced itself immediately as an unusual object. Warm Chris is quieter and more self-assured, which somehow makes it more unsettling. The arrangements are minimal, often just guitar and voice, with occasional orchestral textures that arrive and dissolve without explanation. The production, handled again in part by John Parish, treats silence as a compositional element rather than an absence.

The lyrics operate in a zone between autobiography and surrealism that makes conventional interpretation feel beside the point. Harding is interested in what language can suggest rather than what it can state, and she uses melody with the same oblique intentionality. A line in “Fever” arrives at an angle that makes its emotional meaning clear before the words themselves have settled.

Warm Chris was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and drew significant critical attention. It belongs on any honest list of the better records of 2022, and it holds up on repeated listening in ways that a lot of its year’s more celebrated competition does not.