Rocking up to a new situation, yet being fully there and instantly the centre of attention. It’s a performer’s knack, if that’s the right word, and one that Aldous Harding understands how to deploy. As Long Live Vinyl waits for Harding, who’s off having lunch, outside 4AD’s nondescript offices in south west London, the street seems quiet. Then suddenly she arrives as if from nowhere, dressed in flowing black clothes and appraising you with her enormous eyes. How did she do that?
It’s a question you may also find yourself asking of her new album, Designer, a record that, to judge by the size of the venues she’s playing on recently announced dates later this year, is building on the critical and cult-commercial success of its 2017 predecessor, Party. Which is to say Designer is an album where many of the songs, especially those that open the album, are playful and catchy without ever coming across as remotely throwaway or light.
“It’s funny because when I talk about how it really is, it sounds really uninteresting,” says Harding, real name Hannah, once we’re safely ensconced in 4AD’s offices, “but I wrote the songs because I felt like writing them. It was a combination of wanting to write them, knowing I had to write them, wanting to want to write them, and then I saw it taking on a certain form that I was not trying to resist, so there was a lightness to these sounds – not necessarily the content.”