Ella Langley

Ella Langley sings country with the grain left in. Her voice moves from honeyed to hoarse inside a single line, and the guitars behind it lean closer to rock than to anything polished. The writing is blunt about drinking, wanting and regretting, and it makes no attempt to tidy itself up afterwards.

The songs are built on plain-spoken detail and a big, conversational chorus, and the duet is a recurring form: several of her best-known recordings are two-handers in which the argument between the voices is the whole point. Born in 1999, she moved into music full time at twenty, releasing the EP Excuse the Mess before the albums Hungover and Dandelion. Her early listening ran to hard-country songwriters, and it shows in how little the writing flinches.

Live, the delivery is looser and louder than on record, the rasp pushed harder and the choruses handed over to the room. It suits anyone who wants country that still sounds like it was written after a bad night rather than in a meeting.