The Masked Singer
An interviewer asks Aldous Harding if she thinks her music is vulnerable. "Totally," she replies. "It's vulnerable in the sense that it can be rewound, fast-forwarded, stopped or deleted, not bought, criticized." When a journalist asks about vulnerability in art, usually the question is aimed at whether the artist feels disproportionately known. Does the music open a way into a private place that has now been amplified? Are the particularities of your life story suddenly out there for anyone to consume? Harding speaks to a different kind of vulnerability, not emotional but economic: The New Zealand artist makes records, and people could always decline to stream or purchase them, or tell each other to avoid what she's made.
This type of redirection, from typical question to atypical answer, threads much of her music Across her past three albums — 2019's , 2017's and her 2014 debut — Harding has eased from severe, guitar-based etchings into arch, sleight-of-hand chamber pop. She sings over instruments that, for the most part, engage with the human body directly, whose tones reverberate in actual space, far from the black box of
