Kate Nash – 9 Sad Symphonies

9 Sad Symphonies lives up to its title. Kate Nash’s fifth album is despondent, but matter-of-fact about it. Refreshingly not posturing healing or closure, it foregrounds pain and honours sitting in low-spirits in order to make sense of it. This rough emotional journey is softened by interminably twee sonics: the album’s staple tentative strings and gentle intonation evoke a sweet, Beatrix Potter-like bucolic world, in which fields are skipped through and lacy antimacassars cushion dozing heads.

Respectably bold to commit to nihilism on a pop song, Millions of Heartbeats itemises malaise: loneliness, numbing, even clunky social commentary. Wasteman is a pointed riot act-reading that curiously adopts a garage beat to efface a prick from memory, while the Florence and the Machine-esque Abandoned feels like a lyrical dance that tells a story of despair – in arabesque, she reaches for the bottle. Horsie, with its repetitions of 'You are not here', brings to mind a neglected mid-century housewife, dusting tchotchkes and necking barbiturates. 

Mirroring Ed Sheeran’s Sandman, These Feelings is so inoffensive, it’s destined to be weaponised in a British Gas advert, while the more compelling Ray describes the hard climb out of a depression. Vampyre is a humorous and hopeful closer that impresses with Bob Dylan inflections and bawdy declarations. 

As some similar-sounding songs morph into the other, we can sometimes feel the narrow scope of 9 Sad Symphonies, but Nash charms with the winning, irreverent bluntness first employed in her vaunted debut, showing received pronunciation the proverbial finger.

Listen to: Wasteman, Ray, Vampyre