Worden sings about circumstantial incompatibility- 'If I was love/ Then you were shhh'- with convincing fervor, before the track transforms into a quasi-reassuring mantra. Strummed opener 'We Added It Up' is punctuated by various strings and toots it unfolds like a Rube Goldberg contraption, all call and response. But these intense songs, sung with a crystalline elasticity, have located the mojo previously absent from My Brightest Diamond’s art.Already well known for her collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians ( Sufjan Stevens, the National), Worden is now backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic, who add plenty of playful bits to her oft-ethereal, shifting folk songs. Ultimately, nothing on This Is My Hand gives you an irregular heartbeat quite like Pressure. I Am Not the Bad Guy combines a naggingly straightforward riff and building intensity with chamber pop arrangements in the second half. With its brass runs, Lover Killer has internalised the dynamic lessons of dance-pop there is a seriously funky pre-chorus and a billowy pop denouement. It may be news to Worden, but rock’n’roll actually got here first with its “ramalama”s and “woah-oh-oh”s.Įlsewhere, she fares better at de-evolving her art. Unfortunately, the song itself is far too wordy to make the point. “Oohs” and “beeps”, Worden argues on Before the Words, are just as important as words. Jared Diamond’s study, The Third Chimpanzee, made Worden think about pre-linguistic sound-making. The ideas for this album grew out of a scatologically frank cine-opera called River of Fundament, by composer Jonathan Bepler and Matthew Barney, in which Worden performed. This Is My Hand remains ferociously arty.

Lady Gaga even inspired one chord progression on this latest album. “Be changed, or be undone.” She changed, and it could be the making of her. “Sh-sh-sh-Shara, this is going to hurt,” ran 2011’s Be Brave, which found Worden looking scary in face paint. Up until now, My Brightest Diamond songs have been cerebral and emotive, but lacking in groove – chamber pop about Obama’s inaugural speech, or self-reflexive tracks about fear. There is a vein of female pop with which Worden shares some DNA – the operatic Zola Jesus, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor – but the last time the UK saw Worden, the singer was in classical mode, performing in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, at London’s Royal Festival Hall, part of 2013’s The Rest Is Noise festival. But unlike St Vincent, Worden lacks a grounding in hard rock. You could compare Worden to Annie “St Vincent” Clark, another veteran of Stevens’s marching bands and collaborator of David Byrne’s. Worden has come to some renown through indie mystic Sufjan Stevens’s family of collaborators her albums are released on his label. This Is My Hand, Worden’s most accessible album by some distance, finds this opera-trained singer embracing the debased idiom of pop. A worthy addition to the canon of songs about diamonds (via Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minnelli, Kanye West and Rihanna), it is also unlike anything Worden has released before.

With the right sync or remix, Pressure could go places. “Disperse the white light!” she commands, and a rave shakedown, not a million miles from the Knife, ensues.

My brightest diamond be brave