Over fidgety, impatient keys, Lala Lala – UK-born, US-primarily based completely Lillie West – announces her arrangement to plug away. “Earn me out of The US,” she whispers, pissed off, on opener Vehicle Anymore. Yet West’s fourth album (and first for Sub Pop) is about stillness – or attempting to wrestle the flee to hurry.

After darting between Chicago, Unique Mexico, Reykjavík and London, West found bask in in Los Angeles and began to build down roots. But Heaven 2 (produced by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte) is shrouded in uncertainty, with cloaks of reverb, and lyrics buried under breathy deflection. Scammer toys with the romantic stress of threatening to interrupt up city, over an austere soundscape of purring synths and crisp snare, whereas Anywave battles a disaster of self – “If I existed, I don’t from now on” – across bleary sirens and a spinning drum machine, love a nihilist sibling to Lorde’s Melodrama.

Nearer to the sonic loneliness of West’s most modern instrumental album than her pop-pushed indie rock singles, Heaven 2 sits in limbo, with a mid-tempo claustrophobia that can indubitably feel numbing and repetitive. It’s a disgrace that the album’s most provocative functions – an earthy, freeing saxophone from longtime collaborator Sen Morimoto, and snatches of rusted, steel electronics – are commonly confined to a monitor’s last moments; Programs stands apart for West’s sudden vocal assertiveness and the aching abet-and-forth of a violin. Amid the stress, This City provides a uncommon moment of birth: a soaring drone slices through the sky as West has a excellent looking, cinematic realisation about sticking round: “I need I was at a occasion, and it’s seemingly you’ll perchance well acquire my perceive,” she ventures, coronary heart-on-sleeve. “Having never viewed every other, we’d birth all of it tonight.”