Cate Le Bon - Reward (2019) [Hi-Res]

'There's a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night', Cate Le Bon says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to 'Reward'. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers - the first piano she had ever owned - for company, 'windows closed to absolutely everyone', and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider's back catalogue.