Aldous Harding’s world of mystery

You can hear Aldous Harding swallow her own saliva between songs tonight thanks to the exquisite acoustics in the Barbican Hall, and the expectant silence that greets her in the audience. The third evening of Harding’s sold-out three-night London residency is a close-listening affair, one in which this extraordinary singer-songwriter chooses not to lubricate the gaps between tracks with much in the way of chat.

The gnomic musician has never made it easy for the listener, in song or in person. Train on the Island, the night’s first track, is cool, bluesy and barely there, a series of vignettes and sense impressions.

I Ate the Most, another song from her recent album Train on the Island, released at the start of May, follows in a similar but more intense vein, laying down a series of intriguing negatives. “I’m not afraid, like you’re not gay / And you’re not old, like I’m on the spectrum,” it begins, before describing disordered eating and a child being told she is too heavy to be carried. There are oblique references to “The Silver Chair and Rilian” from the Chronicles of Narnia, and “silver hair and Ritalin”.

Across five albums, Harding’s first person voice has been unreliable; her breadcrumb trails often run out, as though eaten by sparrows before they reach anything definitive. You never really know what is afoot – but that is part of the appeal of this cult artist. Tonight, she throws out a “You OK?”, answering the crowd’s whoop with “Same”. Later, she asks: “You wish there’d be a few more quips from me?”, then leaves the thought dangling.

This artist is emphatically not here to play the genial hostess, but to unfurl a new album that - while featuring some of the most outgoing and accessible tracks of her career thus far - preserves the awkward mysteriousness of her music. Tonight, in this exceptionally high-quality audio setting, we hear most of the new record, plus a few tracks from 2022’s Warm Chris. There’s room at the end for knockout oldies such as Imagining My Man, the 2017 hit that broke Harding out of obscurity and reintroduced the erstwhile folk artist as a black turtle-necked, red-lipsticked siren with a hint of Nico’s enigmatic froideur.

Music – especially made by women – is often caught in a bind. Listeners respect craft and well-spun stories, but tend to prize the nakedly confessional; songs of emotion tied to personal experience. Songs are often designed to be decoded, stuffed with Easter eggs or autobiography á clef. Lorde, New Zealand’s premier musical export, put an X-ray of her abdomen on her last album cover to emphasise its all-exposing candour.

This New Zealander, by contrast, occupies a more impressionistic space – cryptic, assured. Her songs are often unsolvable, especially since she stopped giving interviews, but you find yourself singing along, won over even by non-sequitur couplets such as: “Big thick coats on the dogs of people, just trying to help.” Harding increasingly makes the kind of records you can let wash over you, with nagging hooks and unexpected earworms.

For this reason, she is both a candidate for the pantheon of greats and a frustrating writer, prone to quirkiness and whimsy. One Stop is peak Harding: chanelling both Joni Mitchell and R&B, she trills: “Why wouldn’t I wanna meet ya? Why wouldn’t I wanna hold ya?” If Lady Does It is an unconvincing chamber-folk riddle that leaves you wishing for Harding’s setups to have satisfying denouements. Venus in the Zinnia is an easy-going love song, a duet with her real-life partner H Hawkline, who also plays in her band. But the track only really catches light when a third party joins in – Mali Llywelyn with her inspired honky-tonk piano.

The cover of Train on the Island, meanwhile, is another act of delicious obfuscation. It shows the singer’s face, coloured blue, looking up at the photographer’s lens from what looks like tiered lecture theatre seating. The image is the inverse of an X-ray; does it hint at Mitchell’s Blue?

Train on the Island outclasses Harding’s last outing by some measure, with an uptick in reverberating musicality greatly emphasised by the band tonight. Three multi-instrumentalists play Rhodes piano, pedal steel and the harp as well as more conventional bass, guitar and keyboards. They change time signatures with well-drilled ease, and their just-so application of backing vocals on a phrase or word is one of the gig’s delights.

Although some of Harding’s ardent fans try to crack her codes, most are happy to remain in a state of unknowing, relishing her expressive voice – ranging from matter-of-fact huskiness to jazz soprano – as it tells of not quite meeting John Cale or “Sicilians reaching over the clams”. Sitting with Harding in the uncertainty is the only way to go.

Photograph Antonio Olmos for The Observer