Marika Hackman

Debut album, 'We Slept At Last', available now"

Hackman’s debut album, We Slept at Last, is due next month. Her natural “awkwardness” translates as something else in her music. Her voice is boyish and unadorned, and her eyes-down approach looks intense rather than diffident. Her songs are full of surprising modulations that lie just on the wrong side of pretty and her guitar playing is steady as a mill-wheel. Hackman mixes something ancient and modern, and typically British, in the way only Nick Mulvey has done in recent years. Her songs sound as old as peat bogs, but as smart as Radiohead. In the past two years she has toured with Laura Marling, the 1975 and alt-J, and has struck up a musical partnership with producer Charlie Andrew.