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Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”

The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs; the weird costumes; the videos filled with her pulling faces and engaging in awkward choreography; the preponderance of mannered vocal tics and funny accents when she sings, noticeable on Train on the Island’s Worms (vaguely Gallic vowel-stretching) and closer Coats (strangulated little girl voice); the halting, elliptical interviews: for fans, this is evidence of true originality in a cookie-cutter era.

There are, inevitably, others who find all this stuff insufferable, or at least a bit too self-conscious for its own good: as New Order’s Bernard Sumner remarked of fellow Mancunians World of Twist, “a little bit We Are Weird”. Whether you find Harding fascinatingly strange and unique or irksomely contrived is up to you: there’s no universal gauge for the authenticity of weirdness, and one person’s appealingly unbound outlier is invariably another’s irritating pain in the arse. But, as Train on the Island proves, what isn’t really up for question is her skill as a songwriter.

The album’s contents don’t stray too far sonically from those of 2022’s Warm Chris or 2019’s Designer. Like its predecessors, it’s produced by long-term PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, heavily features multi-instrumentalist Huw Evans (better known as left-field singer-songwriter H Hawkline) and settles comfortably into warm, softly psychedelic territory, boundaried by the sparse folk of ballad Riding That Symbol and the electronics that lend opener I Ate the Most the tone of a less agitated Radiohead circa Kid A. In between, the mood tends to the cozy and languorous – at odds with the occasional lyrical intimation of mental disrepair and medication. The pedal steel is regularly broken out, a harp is deployed to striking effect on the coda of What Am I Gonna Do? and the tracks are driven by acoustic guitar and piano. If it’s not a radical departure, it creates an inviting space in which to linger as its 10 songs unfurl.

The most striking thing about said songs isn’t their weirdness, but how tightly written, compact and, in their own understated way, punchy they are. Even the longest thing here, the title track that tips over five minutes, never shades into indulgence. The songs that feel episodic never ramble, but deal in impressively acute, stimulating contrasts – as when One Stop and San Francisco move unexpectedly from a hypnotic piano figure and clouds of electric piano respectively into the same, noticeably brighter-hued acoustic guitar-backed refrain. If you aren’t among those listeners inclined to take notes and unravel the lyrics for clues, they work simply as conduits for utterly lovely melodies: the key-shifting Coats, or the sparkling duet between Harding and Evans on Venus in the Zinnia, or the tune that snaps What Am I Gonna Do? into sharp focus. As the heavy-lidded Worms makes its slow but sweet progress, it’s hard to imagine even the most vociferous naysayer of Harding’s oddball approach not being at least a little won over.

Of course, if you buy wholeheartedly into the mythology of Harding, there’s plenty here to puzzle over: lines suggestive of neurodivergence, or that seem to pick away at her relationship with her mother, with whom she performed live early on in her career, and who appeared doing martial arts moves in the video for her 2017 single Horizon. There’s at least one lyric that seems to be addressed to those eager to interpret what she’s driving at with a shrug: “I’m only riding that symbol,” she sings. “No one knows what I’m into.”

But buying into the mythology isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying what’s here. At the heart of Train on the Island lurks stuff that’s rather less complicated than you might expect. A melodically gifted singer-songwriter, music that’s subtle but never bland; these are disarmingly straightforward pleasures that all the strangeness – mannered or otherwise – can’t obscure.

This week Alexis listened to

Ashnymph – Island in the Sky
Propulsively danceable, slightly unsettling, with a layer of grime that doesn’t entirely conceal a sweet melody: Ashnymph continue to plough their own weird furrow.