Tracey Thorn – Record – Ltd Ed, Red Colored Vinyl, Merge Records, 2018

As ever, the personal has often been political in Tracey Thorn’s work. Across 4 decades, her songs and writing have offered up a clear-eyed woman’s view of the immediate world around her, from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early ’80s band Marine Girls through sixteen years as one-half of articulate multimillion-selling duo Everything But The Girl, to her recent acclaimed memoirs and journalism. “I think I’ve always written songs which chronicle the milestones of a woman’s life,” she says. “Different ages and stages, different realities not often discussed in pop lyrics. If 2010’s Love and It’s Opposite was my mid-life album – full of divorce and hormones – then this album represents that sense of liberation that comes in the aftermath, from embarking on a whole new ‘no f***s given’ phase of life.”