Aldous Harding’s Songs Won’t Be Pinned Down

Aldous Harding, 26, shies away from explaining the quiet, cryptic, utterly arresting songs on Party, her second album and first American release. Harding, who is from New Zealand, was in New York at the end of an American showcase tour. Her sets often started with curious audiences and ended with rapt ones, according to the New York Times’ Jon Pareles.

Party was produced by John Parish, who has been a catalyst for intense songwriters like PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius (who makes a guest appearance on the album) and Laura Jean, an Australian songwriter who pointed Parish toward Harding.

Harding said, “I don’t really like to talk about what my songs are about.”

It’s not a matter of coyness or defensiveness, though she does prefer that listeners find their own meanings. Sometimes it’s just uncertainty. “There are some that I listen to, and I think, where did that come from?” she said.

Harding’s first album, Aldous Harding and her performances brought her wide attention across New Zealand and Australia in 2015. “I had ambition then, but I have a lot more now,” she said. She decided to write her next set of songs about “love and strength,” she said. And she realised that “I can be anything.”

The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas awarded Harding 4 out of 5 stars for the debut describing the “eerie carnival” of songs as “spellbinding”.

“The party of the title isn’t a right old knees-up with jelly and ice cream – more likely she’s party to a crime of passion … It’s an album that creates a very particular headspace of desire, paranoia and possibility,” Beaumont-Thomas writes.

Harding is now touring Europe. She plays in Manchester on 24 May, Glasgow on 25 May and then in Amsterdam on 28 May. She returns to play US shows in June.

She is from Auckland.

Original article by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, May 17, 2017.

Photo by Tom Jamieson.