Lucy Liyou – MR COBRA

Lucy Liyou’s work has always been almost painfully exposed, her preferred form being foggy collages seemingly because it’s the closest method to actually being in her brain, the affectations of traditional songcraft merely a barrier to getting into the real mulch of herself. MR COBRA takes the form of what is essentially a radio play, though admittedly one fractured and shredded until it’s a long way from anything you’d get on Radio 4. But Liyou’s self-excavation is still present. In her own words, the record is "a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator." She’s at her probing, terrifying best here.

Despite the confines of narrative, Liyou’s pieces still exist in constant motion, always a stream of unexpected shifts and upendings, but occupying headspaces and characters beyond herself allows her to spread her sonic palette wider, the record flitting through genres and tones with abandon. It feels less like the dream logic drift of her previous albums, and more a kind of cartoonified whirlwind, a sensation that could cheapen things, but rather, particularly in the album’s latter stages gives a disarming intensity that is totally overwhelming. It’s a sensation that sneaks up on you, a kind of mania at once funny, alarming and harrowing, and it all adds up to something unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.

Listen to: Old Macdonald Had a Charm, Romeopathy, Constrictor (Haha)