Laura Marling Essentials

Laura Marling may have left school at an early age (she dropped out at 16, shortly before springing from London’s nascent nu-folk scene to sign her first record deal) but her music tends to be defined by a voracious intellectual hunger. Finger-plucked novellas on the spectre of lost love (“Ghosts”); languidly sensual explorations of the female muse (“Wild Fire”); galloping bursts of Americana, broadly shaped by both the landscape of Joshua Tree and the films of experimental director Alejandro Jodorowsky (“Strange”)—the arc of her prolific output since 2008 debut I Speak Because I Can has been a steep curve of ambition and execution rising in tandem. But the Hampshire-raised artist’s gift—alongside the sparkling, mutable power of a voice rendered enigmatic by time in both London and LA—is that she wields these heavy themes with urgently melodic subtlety. “Master Hunter” rumbles and snarls with triumphant Appalachian fury, while “Held Down” (which comes, of course, from a record addressed to Marling’s imagined daughter) is ripe with lustful longing, soulful hummingbird notes and zephyr-light harmonies.