Bianca Scout - The Heart of the Anchoress (2023)

Levitational hypnagogic aether-pop from Bianca Scout, who follows impressive collaborations with Space Afrika, Ben Vince, and Elena Isolini with a spellbinding compound of narcotic chorals, blunted after-hours ambience, and chopped-n-screwed sacred music. RIYL Grouper, Empress, Teresa Winter, Mhysa.

The best clue to unraveling Bianca Scout's latest album is her brilliant - and bizarrely under-heard - 2020 EP Elemental Figures. While her previous records had fixated on that beguiling voice and her dark, dreamworld interpretations of pop, this short experiment, billed as a proposed ballet score, dissolved carved-up classical fragments and church music into gaseous, half-heard memories. 'The Heart of the Anchoress' picks up these diaristic excerpts and twists them into a dissociated long-form narrative characterized by blank-voiced vocal murmurs, spiraling lullabies and strained, painful rhythms. The album emerged from a recording session at Camberwell's St. Giles' Church, where Scout was able to record not just the historical building's famous pipe organ, but the chaotic south London ambiance that adds both texture and a faint, rattling percussion to each track.

In a cultural landscape trapped in a nostalgia loop, but it's refreshing to hear an artist make distinctly British music that's haunted without being hauntological. Scout avoids the most obvious references, opting to tarnish more distant pasts with a musical vocabulary that's as informed by contemporary pop as it is experimental forms. In her hands, Medieval church music is a color that compliments AutoTuned vocals, wobbly afterhours bass drones, and cultural references to a lifestyle that's rooted in the post-pan reality. 'The Heart of the Anchoress' is a folk album that feels philosophically lashed to the club, yet makes none of the usual broad strokes it takes to get our minds there.

On opener 'Empty Space', detuned plucks, organ wails and pedal bumps pierce the room's palpable shape, giving way to rotating foley rhythms that sound like an inverse 4/4. Is there a kick drum? Or is it a cable being pulled from an amplifier? Loose beats collide with each other like derailed trains, and Scout's choral vocals swirl into intense sheet noise. 'Vanguard' extends these ideas further, looping wooden clatters as a foundation for wavering organ drones and Scout's unforgettable vocal turn, that puts her somewhere between Empress's Nicola Hodgkinson and Eartheater, flitting from dry British nonchalance to hyperdream poptimism seamlessly.

But it's her more low-key moments that stand out for us: 'Chorus' and 'Lamina' shuttle Scout's vocals into the background, submerging them in reverb and echo. The latter dispenses with them almost entirely, foregrounding nauseous organ oozes that build into a fervent crescendo. Elsewhere, Scout embodies the folk whispers that run throughout the album on 'Phantom Limb', wailing an uncannily beautiful song that materializes like mists on a bronze age burial mound. And while so many contemporary artists are more than happy to look into the past simply for decoration, Scout sounds as if she's channeling spirits that control her, contort her, and traumatize her. 'The Heart of the Anchoress' is melancholy and euphoric, angry and ecstatic - its an album that fits the mood of the here and now, as we wonder whether to lose ourselves in digital confusion or escape into a past that's deep, dark, and druidic..