Cate Le Bon with Frances Chang

Cate Le Bon's seventh album Michelangelo Dying was born from raw feeling, surpassing the record she had planned to make. Heartbreak overtook her hesitation to write about love, turning it into a form of cleansing. The result is a shimmering work that captures a wound before healing, yet in doing so, touches upon its pain. Created across Hydra, Cardiff, London and Los Angeles, the album was completed in California's deserta place where much of her inner landscape and sorrow reside. The opening track Jerome unfolds into vast space with elongated words and cryptic guidance to gently read my name / cry and find me here / Im eating rocks. Centered on the various states within love and its aftermath, Le Bon surrendered to abstract emotion and mourning a fantasy. On Mothers of Riches, a letter delivers something wrong before love and existence collapse into nothing, while About Time, with looping drones and rhythmic synths, starkly declares Im not lying in a bed you made. Most powerfully, the centerpiece Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)? evokes both the universal nature and unknowability of loveand by extension, mortality. Her admission I thought about your mother /I hope she knew I loved her strikes painfully at the heart. As much is left unsaid as spoken: Le Bon's richly textured arrangements built in layers when words were missing or unwanted. Musically, a continuation and expansion of a sounda machine with a hearthas taken shape over her last two records (2019s Reward and 2022s Pompeii) as she increasingly took control of playing and producing herself. Guitars and saxophones pushed through pedals, percussion layered, voices filtered create an iridescent, green and silky sound, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing beneath the surface throughout. Then there is John Cale. His mindset of constantly moving forward and confronting life's experiences through art while maintaining a fierce desire to keep his curiosity alive, even so deep into a career, offers vivid inspiration to Le Bon. He makes a poignant appearance on the mournful Ride, where he simply sings, unprompted, Its my last ride.