Emily Barker - Almanac - Metro

You might have already heard Emily Barker and her all-female, Anglo-Australian trio without realising it: a 2008 track graced the title sequence for the BBC’s Wallander. Yet while the Scandinavian hinterlands suit her capacity for frosted melancholy, third album Almanac ploughs a different landscape altogether. It splices classic folk motifs and reckless, sea-shanty hedonism with ancient-sounding songs doused in nautical imagery and bleaker tracks about witch hunts and the settler atrocities committed against Aborigines.