Like countless singer-songwriters before her, South Tyneside-born auteur Nadine Shah has used her lived experience as a springboard. Love Your Dum and Mad, her 2013 debut, channelled her grief after two friends took their own lives. Kitchen Sink, Shah’s 2020 outing, pilloried the absurdities of thirtysomething womanhood. Between records, she has been outspoken on racism and musicians’ dwindling incomes. Filthy Underneath is, though, her most personal statement yet. Topless Mother details a sub par therapy experience with Shah’s usual unsparing eye; Twenty Things pays homage to her fellow-travellers to sobriety, some of whom did not make it.
The idea of trauma porn has deservedly come under scrutiny, particularly where race and gender are factors. But Filthy Underneath feels like an intelligently calibrated vehicle in which musical and emotional progress is made, even as suffering laps at the running boards like flood water. Shah nursed her mother through terminal cancer, got married and divorced, tried to take her own life and entered rehab. She handles the anguish of it all with a deft observational touch. You can hear the link, via producer Ben Hillier, between Shah’s intimate interiors and the stadium goth of Depeche Mode, with whom she recently toured (Hillier has produced both). But a heightened sense of rhythm pushes Shah along relentlessly, and her glacial, swooping melodies contain non-western inspirations such as Sufi singer Abida Parveen.
