Bleep

After the “gushy wet love anthems” of Trinity and the heartbreak scorchers of Phoenix, Eartheater has found a medium in between to unspool the arcane magic held within her songs. Powders is her first album in three years, combining the dark club rhythms and sound collages of her more abstract works with her ever-growing penchant for alluring pop hooks and structures. Focussing on “the art of storytelling through more upfront lyricism”, Powders pushes and pulls between poetry and prose, delivered with Eartheater’s expressive and elastic vocals.

The stuttering experimentalism of albums like IRISIRI is dispersed into a thick fog, where light gets lost in dense arrangements of strings, and sirens call from afar. Yet bursting through the reverberant spray are smooth 90s trip hop inspired beats, proving Powders to be a slick and groovy pop record that toys with expectations. Even in its most acoustic moments such as ‘Face In the Moon’, verdant layers of baroque pop instruments are shuffled amorphously into stumbling plunderphonic sequences, a contrast between glitter and shadow with Eartheater’s breathy vocals guiding the way.

Across a turbulent, blurry spirit world, Eartheater takes on many guises: the yearning chanteuse draped in red velvet, the despairing challenger navigating stormy breakdowns, even the world’s most famous painting on ‘Mona Lisa Moan’, becoming a site of steamy desire as cinematic flurries of guitar plucks meet distorted club synths. ‘Sugarcane Switch’ makes for a raw and restless opener that ties these different forms together through restless beats accelerating and knocking against lush, solemn strings, plucks slipping through the gaps, and emotional vocals spitting with braggadocio.

Eartheater never fails to capture the attention with her immersive sonic worlds, and Powders is yet another step in her fluid evolution as an artist.