Albums of the week: Sault, Madison Beer, Courtney Marie Andrews, Lucy Mellenfield

Chapter 1

Sault

(Forever Living Originals)

Shorn of context, Sault’s latest album (their 13th, roughly) is both noteworthy and delightful – at least at first. Production veterans Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the duo who made Janet Jackson swing, frolic through the credits. Not that Chapter 1 sounds anything like Jam & Lewis’s imperial period: these 10 short tracks mostly foreground Sault in orchestral soul mode, with the occasional funk detour.

Bass-led and garlanded with cinematic strings, songs such as Fulfil Your Spirit find the singer Cleo Sol hovering over a classy live band who percolate expertly below. The opening track God, Protect Me from My Enemies rolls stealthily, all wah-wah guitar and fusion synth melody.

That title hints at some of the turmoil beneath this record’s elegant surface. Sault’s leader Inflo remains locked in a legal battle with former colleague Little Simz, whose last album, Lotus, was full of rage and sorrow over the affair. Here, more than one song – including the title track – takes aim at unnamed opponents. “You’re a loser, hate that I’m a winner,” chant Sol and Inflo. Frequently, Sault serenely claim the high ground. But the ongoing war between two of British music’s most talented creatives means the sweet sounds of Chapter 1 leave a complex, if not bitter, aftertaste. Kitty Empire

Locket

Madison Beer

(Epic)

By numbers, Madison Beer is a huge artist. The New Yorker was spotted online by Justin Bieber at age 12. Now 26, she has amassed billions of streams and 40 million Instagram followers but has struggled to gain the cultural cachet enjoyed by some of her pop peers. This is perhaps because her sound is hard to pin down: on 2023’s Silence Between Songs she played with Tame Impala-esque beats, while last year’s single Make You Mine was Grammy nominated for best dance pop recording. Yet neither of these styles are the thrust of her third album Locket, which favours vocally sumptuous, mid-tempo pop in the vein of Ariana Grande.

Grande’s influence is palpable in the production, while the lyrical wordplay of Angel Wings brings to mind Sabrina Carpenter and the pared-back, hypnotic For the Night has hints of Billie Eilish. Album highlight Yes Baby is a throbbing, dance-heavy offering, and the clearest glimpse of a direction Beer could follow to define her music. Lisa Wright

Valentine

Courtney Marie Andrews

(Thirty Tigers)

Since her 2016 breakthrough album Honest Life, the Arizonan singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews has carved out a niche at the confluence of Americana and soft rock. Written and recorded against a backdrop of contrasting dramas – the near-death of a loved one (now thankfully recovered) and a new romance – Valentine takes musical inspiration from Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and is more than a match for her Grammy-nominated Old Flowers, with heart-on-sleeve lyrics offset by unobtrusive but effective instrumentation.

Emotional power games loom heavy in her words: “Don’t make yourself small, baby, take up space / I’ll always wanna hear what you have to say” (Cons and Clowns); “I wanna be an outsider / It’s too painful looking in” (Outsider). Everyone Wants to Feel Like You Do is a study of male entitlement and swagger, right down to Andrews’s guitar solo, while her talents as a musician are evident elsewhere, such as on the gentle flute coda to Little Picture of a Butterfly. An artist at the top of her game. Phil Mongredien

Tell the Water, She Will Listen

Lucy Mellenfield

(Stoney Lane)

A graduate of the Birmingham Conservatoire, Lucy Mellenfield justly considers herself a jazz-folk singer. Her passionate vocals and self-written songs have roots in both traditions, the fusion of which has produced some of British folk’s finest moments: Pentangle, John Martyn and more.

Mellenfield’s voice is a remarkable instrument; not only can she hit those elusive high notes, she can tell a tale in the same register, before plunging dramatically down to earth, a trick displayed vividly on Like A Feather, which opens this debut album. It’s a song about parental divorce, and the album’s 11 other tracks are similarly revealing – most addressing twentysomething romances; others evoking childhood memories or menacing atmospheres (“Darkness settles, street lamps alight / Earth’s witchcraft begins work for tonight”). How much help they get from Chris Hysen’s echo-heavy production is debatable.

An accomplished pianist, Mellencamp provides much of her own accompaniment, at times recalling that top-order jazz-folk fusioneer Joni Mitchell, but too often the numbers move predictably from sepulchral opening to full-on orchestral finale. As more measured pieces such as Yellow Duck, and Oranges and Lemons show, there are alternatives, while the two-part At the Mercy opens with an effective speech before a doomstruck closure. An adventurous debut. Neil Spencer

Masks used to be a problem in pop: they signalled fakeness. Fans wanted to see the real performer, suffering for their art. But in our social media era, when image is king, anonymity in performance becomes an act of rebellion. For Pollyfromthedirt (Polly = his mum; the Dirt = the nickname for his hometown Darlington) masking also lets him be more honest.

Having taken up guitar after his dad sold the PlayStation, the masked singer aims to make music that enchants and confounds. His first EP The Dirt pt 1 features brilliant “homegrown Northern droll” songs about English culture (A Weekend in Majorca, for example) combining introspective electronics and catchy pop-rock.

Angular lo-fi funk is interspersed with indie balladry, and while acts from Artemas to Ekkstacy often prefer snackable songs, Pollyfromthedirt has the confidence to cook ideas past three minutes, as on the bewildered, addictive Kalm, or Thirteen, with its rubberband-snap rhythm and gorgeous submerged melody. It’s his engaging delivery, even when laden with effects, that lingers. And if you’re unsure about the mask, it is redesigned every two months: “It evolves with the music,” he says drily. “A little more reinforced, a little uglier...” Damien Morris

Pollyfromthedirt’s new single When England Comes is out on Wednesday. Tours UK and Ireland from 22 January

Photographs by PR/Wyndham Garnett