BEFORE SUNSET

Wedged between a 99-cent pizza joint and a cash-only Italian restaurant in New York’s East Village is an unassuming blacked-out building, its facade strewn with graffiti. At first (and second) glance, you might think it’s abandoned. In reality, it’s the entrance to Flux Studios, and it’s here that at various points of the day and night Jesse Malin, Lucinda Williams and bass player Catherine Popper will turn up to work.

It’s a frigid March morning in 2018, and the project in hand is Malin’s eighth studio album, . Williams, here as producer, is a good fit. While Malin’s breakthrough album (2002) was a Lou Reed-flavoured slice-of-life rock’n’roll melodrama from the heart of a native New Yorker, it still had a rich alt.country seam