When the Rachael Lavelle trio (Ryan Hargadon, Hannah Hiemstra and Lavelle herself) saunter onstage in matching white ensembles, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve ended up at some cultish baptism ceremony. And yet, as they tear into their Button Factory set, it dawns on me that Lavelle is actually christening the crowd into a 90-minute sonic hallucination.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.

Rachael Lavelle is an artist who defies easy categorisation. Any attempts at confining her to a single genre are futile. You don’t watch her shows, so much as you spiritually witness them.

For the opener, she swiftly swoops into ‘Travel Size’, a full-boded track which teems with cryptic profundities, swirling saxophone flourishes and rhapsodic synths.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.

The tight two-piece ensemble deftly ground the sky-reaching soundscapes Lavelle traverses. Hargadon’s woodwind warblings augment the singer’s yolk-breaking croon, while Hiemstra’s prismatic rhythms trace the jagged edges of her vocals with flying colours.

Lavelle’s voice is a vibrant thing to behold: pained, nasal, layered, gulping down consonants, seeming to glow. In a live atmosphere, those nuances emerge in chromatic collusion.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.

Her lyrics centre on the rambling streams of twenty-something women with scalpel-sharp accuracy: self-care, clean eating, dabbling in astrology, elliptical machine sessions, oversleeping. While they may read like a promotion of a self-actualising, “ideal” woman, the singer delivers them with a satirical tongue pressed against her cheek.

Some lines don’t recall lyrics so much as affirmations. ‘Big Dreams’ is perhaps the best case in point with its repeated outro, “I am open to the possibilities”, recited by Doireann Ní Bhriain, whom some of us know as the voice of the Luas tram system in Dublin.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.

‘My Simple Pleasures’, a harmonic and drone-laden track punctuated by a voiceover narrating something out of a dating profile, is another fitting example of Lavelle’s wordcraft. Dispatched by an Amazon Alexa equivalent, lines like “The key to my heart is / Chicken fillet rolls and Fanta” and “Ideal first date: A sunrise swim followed by a bowl of fancy porridge” draw uproarious laughter from the crowd for its absurdity. But what makes this performance even more of a spectacle are the ethereal melodies Lavelle mutters beneath the voiceover, evoking the ethereal beauty that lies on the underside of our own cerebral occupations.

‘Let Me Unlock Your Full Potential’ is perhaps her biggest song, and for good reason. The alt-pop libretto, pedalled by otherworldly undertones, touches on a never-ending search for divine solutions to existential problems. While it seems impossible to replicate the track on stage, the Lavelle trio pass muster and deftly maintain its epic, blood-pumping beauty.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.

At a time when many artists swirl around already carved-out scenes, Rachael Lavelle operates on a completely different, and utterly cosmic, level. To assign her a contemporary would be a difficult undertaking; her music appears to genuflect at the altars of Laurie Anderson, Björk and Beach House.

The hallucinatory set ends with ‘Perpetual Party’, which conjures captivating vocals and wondrous instrumentation to - as the title suggests - keep the celebration going. As I leave the venue, humming her slantwise melodies under my breath, I’m compelled to believe the celebration is nowhere near its conclusion. Rachael Lavelle is a one-of-a-kind artist who shows no signs of stopping.

Rachael Lavelle at Button Factory. Copyright Maya Solanki.