Marika Hackman has a sweet part-time gig as a Burberry model. She may not need it for much longer: the London-based Finnish singer’s music career looks set to whoosh towards the stratosphere, with We Slept At Last being accompanied by a fair degree of hype.
The dominant emotion here is cast-iron melancholy, for which Hackman’s sonorous warble is the perfect delivery mechanism. Couched in softly twanging acoustic guitars, at moments she sounds a dead ringer for Laura Marling – what sets her apart is carefully pitched understatement. There are hints too of Kate Bush’s zoomania in the dense psychologocal undergrowth of ‘Animal Fear’. Melodrama is rare, however: though Hackman seems perpetually on the brink of a full bore emotional breakdown, she always pulls backs just in time. The result is an LP full of mystery, with Hackman perfectly cast as inscrutable siren.