Before any Bryan Ferry fanatics get carried away with the former Roxy Music frontman’s first new music since 2014’s Avonmore, it should be noted that while Ferry has composed and performs the music on these 11 tracks, his vocal talents are nowhere to be heard.

Instead this “conversation between two artists” sees Ferry laying down a laid-back, synth-driven canvas, over which performance artist, writer and painter,  Amelia Barratt, delivers monologues somewhere between short stories and prose poetry.

Considering my aversion to even the thought of spoken word over music, this is actually impressive. Usually, one listen is enough, and I neither need nor want to hear the story again, but this is different, due both to Ferry’s undoubted musical gifts – check the slinky bassline and funky keyboard coda of ‘Stand Near Me’ – and Barratt’s calm delivery and wonderful lyricism.

‘Florist’, a tale of surreptitiously watching an early morning vendor outside a theatre, is stately and floaty at the same time, thanks to Ferry’s understated piano, while Barratt’s images linger long in the memory, particularly her description of the titular character: “Slim, not noticeably so, just as if nobody expected more or less of him”.

“I used to live for chaos,” she confesses on ‘Pictures Of A Wall’, before unfolding the humdrum of the everyday, from buying mousetraps to mowing lawns, over Ferry’s slowly vibrating, hypnotic backdrop.

Only the closing title-track raises itself to a gentle canter. Listen to it and you can pretty much feel your heartbeat slowing down.

• Out now.