Adrianne Lenker @ YES, Manchester, 17 Jan

Anybody who’s caught Big Thief live over the last couple of years will probably already be familiar with one of Adrianne Lenker’s party tricks. The Brooklyn outfit’s frontwoman has a penchant for trying out new, as-yet-unrecorded material on stage, often prefacing fresh tracks with an offhand comment about how she just wrote this one in the van earlier this week, or how that one came together in half an hour. They then proceed to fire off a track that sounds like it could have been plucked from either of their critically acclaimed LPs, Masterpiece or Capacity. We now know that the move remains part of her repertoire when she plays solo, with tonight’s richly warranted encore at YES featuring two such startlingly accomplished, humbly introduced efforts.

With work on her band’s third LP already well underway, there’s a sense that Lenker doesn’t necessarily need to squeeze in this run of dates behind last year’s criminally underrated debut LP under her own name, Abysskiss. That dissipates early on in a packed Pink Room, when it quickly becomes clear that, shorn of a backing band, it isn’t just her fragile, richly expressive vocals that come to the fore – it’s her virtuosity on the guitar, too. It’s not something she always gets the chance to show off with Big Thief but, tonight, her fingers are up and down the neck of her acoustic with such furious, spidery dexterity that it isn’t a stretch to draw parallels with Nick Drake or Bert Jansch.

Symbol, Cradle and Terminal Paradise all rank among the sweet spots on the setlist where her guitar work is matched by the deftness of her storytelling, but there’s room for a bold new take on Big Thief’s Lorraine, too. You suspect that Lenker’s big statement for 2019 is yet to come in the shape of a full band album that could cement their first three releases as one of the great hat-tricks this side of the millennium, and yet tonight is still a stirring demonstration of her strong claim to being one of her generation’s most gifted songwriters – that, in itself, is a testament to her talent.