Good Woman

Launched in July 2020, the <i>Dial-A-Stave</i> podcast revealed that Watford sisters Emily, Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor can mine entertaining conversation from all manner of lockdown mundanities, asking how many baked potatoes is enough for one sitting and whether you should say “edgeways” or “edgewise”. Arriving six months later, the trio’s third album finds them refocusing on the big questions, processing grief, motherhood and self-actualisation on their most adventurous songs to date. While their harmonies remain warm and pure, and the melodies elegant and adhesive, there’s new abstraction to the music, building on the rangy ambitions of 2015’s <i>If I Was</i>. “Best Friend” bubbles with psych-pop impulses, “Careful, Kid” digs through relationship wreckage with an industrial churn and the gauzy, shifting “Trying” suggests the influence of <i>If I Was</i> producer Justin Vernon.