I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone (LP)

The Seattle four-piece (Julia Shapiro, Gretchen Grimm, Lydia Lund, and Annie Truscott) are following up 2015's Time To Go Home with their third long-player.

Recorded live in July of 2016, with producer Matthew Simms (Wire) at Jackpot! in Portland, Oregon (birthplace of some of their favourite Elliott Smith records), it's a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of moody post-punk that finds the Seattle outfit's feelings in full view, unobscured by humour. There is no irony in its title: Before she had Chastity Belt, and the close relationships that she does now, Shapiro considered herself a career loner.

This is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish ("This Time of Night") to shimmering insight ("Different Now") to gauzy ambiguity ("Stuck," written and sung by Grimm). It's a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Shapiro shares early on its staggering title track: "I wanna be sincere."