Claire Rousay’s Sentiment opens with a diary entry. Detailing one of those days when you really should be OK, but you really ain’t. Listing the positives but still struggling with anxiety, depression, and existential angst. I’m not sure if it’s a modern malaise, but it’s definitely a terrain travelled by those of us who spend far too much time on their own. Those who’ve come to feel lonely, even when they’re not alone. Where everything public both instills panic, and feels like a pretence. While hours are spent privately preparing for this charade. When you stop and you’re no longer sure who you are.

Most of the voices on the record are treated, rendered robotic. Giving them an androgynous Ai feel. Making the frank, candid lyrics totally relatable right across gender’s full fluid spectrum. All you need to get on board is a bruised or broken heart. it could be anything is bedroom studio intimate. A 4-track post-break up confessional where a violin weeps sympathetically, as the one that can’t let go indulges in late night nostalgia, inflicting a bitter sweet self-destructive agony.* The softly strummed please 5 more minutes summons rueful romantic flashbacks to a tender togetherness. The distortion on asking for it bends clarity out of shape, like when you’re fucked up, drunk, high, but unhappy. Bouncing off walls as you stumble down hotel halls, on your way to refill the ice bucket. For all the processing, there’s something pure here, something real, that the effects can’t hide. Recounting a bottom that you perhaps have to reach. Bereft, before you can rebuild.

It’s fitting that album’s on Thrill Jockey, given the imprint’s post-rock past. Claire’s music here is frayed folk and Americana. The cyclical playing on ily2, for example, echoes Tortoise’s TNT and David Pajo’s plucking. On iii, the strings’ squeezebox drones produce a peaceful score – part Nick Cave & Warren Ellis soundtrack, part Yves Tumor’s ambient – where I picture our protagonist passing out, waking, and then boozing again before the hangover gets a hold. 4pm’s words give way to drilling, swells of orchestra strings, and polite acoustic picking – like everyday beauty battling beneath industrial, urban noise. Sycamore Skylight, peppered with piano and birdsong, transports Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure to a tower block balcony. Concrete jungle chamber music where your view’s a parched parking lot and a couple of potted plants.

Claire Rousay’s Sentiment is out today, on Thrill Jockey.

*I became a bit obsessed with this song – a soon to be seminal slice of sonic sadness – playing it over and over. It was the reason that I decided to write a review. It’s not that the lyrics relate to my current situation – boy, I’m way out of that game – but there’s something pure, perfectly honest about them, despite the robot doing its best to hide how real they are. It hit me the same way as say, Ex:Re’s The Dazzler and Cassandra Jenkins’ Hard Drive.