Trev Elkin

A fata morgana is a trick of the light. A mirage that can turn a distant ship into a floating castle or create coastlines when layers of air at different temperatures bend light It’s a good name for a record built almost entirely from things slippery enough to avoid routine efforts to define them. Taja Cheek, who has released four albums as L’Rain, refuses genre boundaries on principle.

Nina Winder-Lind is the Swedish-born cellist and a singer in Brighton’s The New Eves, whose debut album The New Eve Is Rising was one of last year’s more unusual, Midsommar meets The Raincoats breakthroughs, a heady brew of folk-punk underpinned by her deep, wavering vibrato. On Wild Love she mostly sets down the cello for electric guitar, and Bob Dylan’s phrasing winds through these songs like bindweed. She doesn’t mask her influences; they just don’t tell the whole story.

There’s a photo in the press kit for If I Let It Quiet that tells you most of what you need to know. It’s a screenshot of a video call: Josaleigh Pollett on one side, headphones on, laughing in their makeshift Salt Lake City home studio; on the other, under the username “crowdshy,” Jordan Watko at a keyboard in his Osaka apartment, mid-sentence, not looking at the camera. Two windows, two rooms, two countries, fourteen time zones.