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John Glacier: Like a Ribbon album review – this otherworldly British voice is in a class of her own


She frames herself as an alien visitor, and sure enough, this ideas-packed album at the edges of rap doesn’t sound like anyone else right now – you’ll be repeating it again and again

Photograph: Publicity imageMore than one critic has compared the effect of her vocal style – occasional bursts of brisk lyricism separated by sections in which she incants the same phrases over and over, as if in a stoned daze – to overhearing someone’s scattered voice memos. It’s the kind of idiosyncratic approach around which cult followings are built, and one is duly building around Glacier: she’s now signed to Young, home of the xx and FKA twigs; a succession of fashion designers have called upon her services as a model. They’re part of a teeming mass of mysterious sounds: the glitching, incomprehensible voices that interrupt Satellites; the murky pool of slowed-down samples beneath Steady as I Am; the solitary, authentically distressing scream that suddenly appears out of nowhere towards the end of Don’t Cover Me.

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Photo of Ribbon

Ribbon

Photo of John Glacier

John Glacier