Maria Somerville’s second album of folk-tinged shoegaze arrives at an apposite time. TikTok has turned the genre accurate into a every day life for alt children, while the on-line radio quandary NTS has made itself synonymous with hazy, deadpan underground pop. However the Irish musician’s sound feels distinctive: both a miniature alienating – chilly to the touch, unnervingly atmospheric – and a miniature horny, songs treasure Mayfly and Violet inspiring with an alluring looseness that recurrently eludes experimental indie song of this stripe.

Easy however evocative lyrics imply an endearing curiosity about the world: “Customarily the sky / Invitations me to essentially be / Myself extra than it can per chance well per chance truly be,” she sings on Day out, a curiously spherical phrase that feels tentative and obvious at the identical time. Somerville sings in hushed tones surrounded by frigid manufacturing, however ought to you listen carefully, these songs point out themselves to be strangely swollen with texture and detail: harps twinkle treasure broken glass and dishevelled breakbeats reverberate broadly, seemingly recorded by a bedroom wall. She has an gargantuan purview: section of the fun of Luster is listening carefully ample to catch on the traces of pop, hymnal, outing-hop and experimental electronic song that lies underneath.
It’s which capacity that that makes Luster so vividly alive: here is now not any dusty genre advise. It became once inspired by Somerville’s house of Connemara, and she or he most steadily luxuriates in nuanced, evocative area recordings, as on closer October Moon, when she samples the sound of waves at low tide. But birth air those moments of specificity, it feels treasure a representation of the gargantuan class of solitude, and the moderately chaos that might per chance well be came across in mute moments: a symphony of itsy-bitsy suggestions rendered within the colors of a sundown.
