ALDOUS HARDING
“I’m a little bit older but I remain unchanged”
Warm Chris
4AD
NO stranger to the incomprehensible visual metaphor, Aldous Harding is wearing a blonde wig and a lizard’s tail in the video for “Lawn”, the skittish beach samba released to herald the arrival of her fourth album. “Can you imagine me just being out and free?” the 31-year-old asks. “Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me”.
Listening to the defiantly peculiar , it’s not easy to imagine how much more untethered the artist born Hannah Topp can get. The cryptic crossword lyrics and séance medium voices that defined 2019’s Art Deco-toned are even more apparent on a record that welds the shape-shifting artistry of Cindy Sherman, scripted by ’s Collaterlie Sisters. Idiosyncratic has been Harding’s modus operandi ever since her mid-twenties when she reneged on her plan to become a vet, having been wary of following her folkie parents into a life on the margins. Born and raised in Lyttleton, New Zealand, she first appeared on record as a teenager, guesting on her mother Lorina’s 2004 album, , but struck out on her own musically with her self-titled 2014 album, choosing Aldous Harding as a singing pseudonym, apparently because “Aldous” sounded like “a manly Alice”.
