Laura Marling - Song for Our Daughter

The Guardian 80

(Partisan/Chrysalis)

Laura Marling’s seventh album is addressed to an imaginary daughter: it provides succour, perspective and more than a few warnings. “Sometimes the hardest thing to learn is what you get from what you lose,” she muses on Blow by Blow. The title track counsels against taking advice from “some old balding bore” in the music industry who wants her to remove her clothes.

Having taken a step back from music, Marling has returned better than ever: focused and oaky and gauzy. Here, she channels the north American singer-songwriter canon quite plainly, landing somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan on Strange Girl, with detours into Leonard Cohen (the excellent Only the Strong, the opener Alexandra, which takes its cue from Cohen’s Alexandra Leaving) and Neil Young; her fascination with Paul McCartney is newfound.

Related: On my radar: Laura Marling's cultural highlights

Pitchfork 76

The starkly beautiful seventh album from the venerable singer-songwriter reveals more of her aged wisdom through winding narratives rich with humor and despair.

The Guardian 0

(Partisan/Chrysalis)
Written to an imaginary child about ‘what it is to be a woman in this society’, the singer’s seventh album is alternately intimate, sneering and sad, and lavished with gorgeous melodies

Laura Marling has described her seventh solo album as a kind of conceptual work. Song for Our Daughter, she says, is about “trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society”. The songs are written to an imaginary child, offering her “all the confidences and affirmations I found so difficult to provide myself”. It has also turned up months earlier than expected. Scheduled for release in August – the beginning of the annual three-month season when albums by major artists traditionally appear – it has been brought forward. “In light of the change to all our circumstances,” Marling wrote on Instagram, “ I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and, at its best, provide some union.”

Related: Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras