Imagine a love-letter from an android to a human, drawing as much on glam and folk as it does on retro-futurism, and where vaulting self-harmonised vocals carry implicit and explicit threats. This is ‘Bachelorette’, and although it’s ridiculously high-concept it’s almost worryingly listenable.

Bachelorette is the solo project of Annabel Alpers and this, her third album, was recorded in isolated locations in her native New Zealand, as well as England, Libya and the USA. When someone like MIA makes a globe-spanning album you end up feeling the connectivity between societies divided by massive geographical distances. However, for Alpers the experience seems to have underlined her separation from the world. Or at least it’s given her enough material to write an album about it.

From the start ‘Bachelorette’ sounds like an intensely personal piece of work. The music envelops you in a warm buzz of vintage synths, littered throughout with acoustic guitars, toy pianos and tambourines, as if they’re archaeological finds. The vocals arrive in multi-tracked swells that sound like the ceiling of a cathedral. There’s a tension and a danger to the lyrics; ‘The Light Seekers’ is a call for people to follow her, with the casual implication that to do so will destroy your physical body. Single ‘Blanket’ has the line, “The only way to see you is through the hole in my chest”: which is possibly the best thing we’ve heard for a long time.

It’s hard to critically approach an album that’s as stylistically isolated as ‘Bachelorette’. It doesn’t seem fair to view it as just the product of its influences, although you can pick out at least half a dozen in the first few songs. It’s simply a tender, funny, engaging piece of work. When the robotic protagonist sings, “Which memory will be the last? Perhaps the last will be the last” on ‘Digital Brain’, it is impossible not to feel affected.

-Toby Dore-