Bachelorette – New Zealand’s Annabel Alpers – seems like the private type. Her pop songs are wrapped up snug in a quilt of digital and analogue patches. They’re obviously all hers, hand woven through and through. On her debut, lyrically, Alpers tends towards the everyday and the simple to charming effects. You get the impression that even a cup of tea for her has the inbuilt soundtrack of Isolation Loops’ space odysseys and whimsical musings. It’s a well-paced and fascinated dawdle through quaint and quiet sounds, filled with bright Casio keyboards gazing out at a carpet of glow-in-the-dark stars.

It’s playful for the most part, but the kitschy keyboard veneer gives way to a poignant sense of storytelling. The sparse ‘And The Earth Knew Absence’ falls after the drum machine-driven ‘Intergalactic Solitude’, beginning with the hushed, ‘I lost my friend today/I can feel his presence all around’. For all the times where Alpers’ voice is buoyant atop her vast palette of sound, there are others where it’s isolated, left floating alone, unguided. This is an insular record, curious; just her voice and ideas on their own, wealthy with inspiration and easy to be swept up by. You glance out the window, the world goes by – it seems faster than usual.

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