The deep, pure, Karen Carpenter croon of 28-year-old Californian Natalie Mering could still slavering beasts, and the pristine chamber pop of her third album sets it in a gentle, 70s singer-songwriter world seemingly untroubled by the present. Listen closer, though, and crisis is all around. “The dystopian is just what it is now,” Mering said recently, and these songs move from the personal pain of a breakup – Seven Words, with its sentimental organ, heartbeat pulse and clouds of choral glory – to the planetary pain of environmental disaster and our Snapchatting detachment from it: “Y, O, L, O… it’s not the past that scares me/ Now what a great future this is gonna be,” despairs Generation Why. The apocalypse has found its smoke-voiced sibyl.
