Fabiana Palladino broke out in 2017 as one of the Paul Institute’s founding artists after her R&B influenced pop reached Jai Paul, who started the label alongside his brother.

She caught the ear of critics – Pitchfork likened “Mystery” to “a scratch track from a big-budget 80s studio that’s been smuggled out on reel-to-reel tape” – but Palladino’s output remained slight while she worked as an in-demand session musician for the likes of SBTRKT and Jessie Ware, cycling from one tour to the next.

All the while, she was intensively working on her self-titled debut album - Fabiana Palladino - in secret. Written and produced by Palladino, it has been a long time coming.

Made in the wake of the end of a long relationship, it’s an intimate, after-dark record that exudes the toughness and femininity of Janet Jackson circa Control and Annie Lennox on DIVA, exerts the classic songwriting of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell and subverts the classic romantic Motown duets of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell to unpick normativity in relationships.

Palladino’s father, Cardiff’s Pino Palladino, is one of history’s most famous session men: she learned from him the integrity it takes to work on other people’s ideas, and gradually understood how to apply it to her own work. The self-titled album feels like a classic pop album: its nimble melodies haunting and sensual, the writing elegantly whittled down to turn complex questions about desire and satisfaction into immediate hooks.

More from Fabiana Palladino