Welcome to Aldous Harding’s island. You’re free to leave anytime you like, but the New Zealand artist is happy to show you around. There are no palm trees here; just the one tree that she used to climb, presumably as a child. Forget about the sensation of floating on the ocean blue; instead, lose yourself in questions like, “When I hit the ocean I was only a spark/ Who brought me up the stem with no love in their heart?” You’ll have to get by eating rocks and plants, but you can dance just to dance. You can get together with friends once in a while, but in the end, of course, it’s just you and your reflection. “I have met my sleeping self/ Things she knows keep me around/ I hope I’m more than I think about,” Harding sings towards the end of her insular yet inviting new album, Train on the Island, which follows 2022’s remarkable Warm Chris. The train is symbolic of thought, naturally, but she chases it down to its roots, snuggles up to the unconscious, and leans into pure, deliciously inscrutable feelings as they emerge. It’s fine if you don’t have the words for it: just take the ride.
1. I Ate the Most
For those keen on describing Harding’s music as incorporeal, the singer-songwriter offers an origin story: “I was nine when I left my body,” she sings, referencing The Chronicles of Narnia before delivering the album’s most immediately quotable couplet: “No regrets, just things that will haunt me/ Maybe I’ll bury them.” She likes her similes to sting and surprise, less interested in wordplay than mind games as she spirals around the knock-on effects of childhood insecurity. (“STEVE ABEL THINKS THAT I AM AUTISTIC,” she posted 14 years ago; now she’s quipping, “You’re not old, like I’m on the spectrum.”) Instead of outright burying them, she sings as if with her head tilted down, vocalizing the burden of trauma like a chip on her shoulder. Thomas Poli and H. Hawkline’s slithery synths aren’t quite ethereal, but they do seem to indulge her yearning to fly by lifting her feet off the ground.
2. One Stop
The lead single’s loopy piano motif reinforces this sense of elevation, piling on layers of acoustic guitar, bass, harp, and electronics. Harding nervously casts herself in the role of unreliable narrator (“So the lies I tell send me up”), though her humorous encounter with John Cale sounds entirely plausible. She’s always been eerily funny, but the opening one-two punch sets the album up almost like a comedy special, if one driven entirely by impulse.
3. Train on the Island
The jokes turn out to be just a foot in the door – now, the same figure of speech that made the record approachable just boggles the mind: “Mommy said my inception was like eating a pearl.” Harding is back to being diaristically insular, just less intent on turning observations like “I hate my perception, but the medication slows my mind” into entertainment; there’s less affectation in her voice, too. Backed by Hawkline’s hypnotic bassline and prodding electric guitar, though, she keeps listeners rapt.
4. Worm
Aided by Joe Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel, the record turns even more languorous, though the unassuming hook still worms – no other word for it, I’m afraid – its way into your head. You start to feel the heaviness here, though Harding briefly finds relief in contradiction: “Great things inside have sat long enough.” Do they not haunt, still? Are they still sitting there, even as they attach themselves to her stream of consciousness?
5. Venus in the Zinnia
The album’s main collaborators get a moment in the spotlight on this early single, an enchanting duet with Hawkline that also features a delightful Wurlitzer solo from Parish. No wonder it sounds like the most sociable track on the LP; when Harding’s music is this breezy, it’s usually at odds with the subject matter, which isn’t so much the case here – if only because it’s hard to tell what it’s about, which is how all friend gatherings should be.
6. If Lady Does It
The drums immediately jump out as livelier than most of the record – played by Seb Rochford, with Parish handling bass and harpist Mali Llywelyn trading piano lines alongside Hawkline. It serves to switch up the energy of the record, giving a more conventionally structured song the full-band treatment; though Harding seems to care less about that than bringing to life her own version of a murder mystery. “If I am a gun then I’m loaded,” she declares, barely lifting the veil of abstraction. No melody on the record is more sinewy or damning than the one on the outro, repeated like a protest chant.
7. San Francisco
‘San Francisco’ suddenly makes you ask questions about how these songs are connected, not least because it reprises a hook from ‘One Stop’ right when you think it’s winding down. The music is back to feeling sedated, Harding narrating in a morning daze until her playing on the Fender Rhodes turns baleful, and you start to wonder if the man “coming down Folsom” is the one with the new bag who’s not a new boy. Her voice’s cutting intimacy, meanwhile, is at its most gentle, and “I’ve never been a believer, I don’t cry when I’m told” is exactly the line that could make your eyes well up. And just then, it evaporates.
8. What Am I Gonna Do?
Over a roiling rhythm section, Harding sinks into her lower register, juxtaposing some of her most bizarre lyrics (“Bechamel on my face”) with a strangely hopeful refrain: “I know things ain’t working out/ But they may come good later.” Llywelyn’s harp prods the song along, culminating in a wonderfully off-kilter solo.
9. Riding That Symbol
Every Aldous Harding record needs a disarmingly lonely, existential ballad, and the acoustic ‘Riding That Symbol’ is this album’s ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’. There’s no more future tense to the “things that will haunt me,” which become “haunts [that] band and it’s no accident.” The spare instrumentation mirrors her disconnected headspace: “No one knows what I’m into/ I’m only riding that symbol.” The mental fog seeps into Thomas Poli’s bed of electronics.
10. Coats
Harding isn’t exactly one to offer clear-cut resolution, but there’s something to be said about her closing with another summery tune in the vein of ‘Venus in the Zinnia’. “Can’t buy the remedy but I’ll eat if you’re next to me,” she sings alongside Hawkline, which is both a full-circle moment and a frankly cherry-picked line about the eating disorder that’s coded into the opening track. The thread might be easier for Harding to trace, but the feeling is that realizing where you’re coming from, how the dots connect, is no door to salvation. “What my God is thinking I get lost in that place,” Harding sings earlier, and Train on the Island is simply her mode of transportation. Thank God it’s public.
