A Man Called Adam - The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart (2023)

The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart is a Balearic record, though not one that’s inspired by those fabled Iberian sun-kissed beaches that stretch on forever and sunsets that stop you in your tracks. Rather, it’s a House record made for all night dancing in a decommissioned steelwork. It’s an ambient record that strolls a windswept coastline where lime-grass dunes rise and fall like slumbering megafauna. The album walks the ugly, lovely industrial coastline of the North East of England, stopping at points to soak up the breathtaking scenery and watch everyday life carrying on in the face of rapid deindustrialisation.

Over the album’s eleven tracks, A Man Called Adam perfectly capture both a time and place. While Starlings dances carefree like a murmuration and The Girl With The Hole In Her Heart trips back through snapshots of terrace house childhood whilst rolling on a retro electro bassline, Hidden Dragon’s low end bass evokes heavy machinery looming large on the horizon. Gorgeous ambient soundscapes like In Favour Of Storms glide gracefully as shift sirens and field recordings of demolition blasts lace with Ammonite’s controlled kettle drum rolls into an addictive Lil’ Louis pulse.

Talking about the effect of her local environment on The Girl With A Hole In Her Heart, Sally says: “Spending this precious time back in the wild coastal and industrial landscapes of Teesside has stirred up that sense of awe at the steely, elemental authority of nature, and in human resilience. The melodies, sounds and lyrics are sometimes flinty and angular, sometimes fluid and fun (because the people are very funny here), and I hope the record reflects those feelings of human fragility and deep time that I always feel looking out to sea on stormy days.”