The Take Her… album cover shot of Róisín Murphy wearing a hard hat and fluorescent jacket on a construction site — about as far from any traditional record industry idea of how to promote a female singer as you can get — informs you that once again, she’s doing things very much in her own idiosyncratic style. In musical terms, this means you get an album full of musical experimentation, which is, happily, bolstered by sensitive, intimate songwriting and a voice that can inhabit a hundred different personalities. 

Album opener “Mastermind” is a shining example of the highly polished, dextrous disco Murphy excels at but from then on the rest of the album confidently wanders into strikingly different areas. Gossamer-light vocals gently float across the electronic-bossa “Lip Service,” synth wave sonnet “Romantic Comedy” is all jumpy disjointed rhythms, chiming synths and outre chords, “Whatever” is a tender, otherworldly ballad with a melody that teeters between pretty and gothic, and songs like “Pretty Gardens” and “Ten Miles High” exist in their own genre category: it’s pop but not as we know it. Another flamboyant and intoxicating album from one of the UK’s most original and consistently interesting artists. 

The salvo of Hairless Toys and Take Her up to Monto in 2015 and 2016 made for a fascinating comeback for Róisín Murphy after an eight year break during which she’d mainly focused on parenthood and only released a scattering of songs. The 17 tracks that make them up were recorded in a single five-week stint with Eddie Stevens — formerly her bandmate in Moloko, and the musical director for all her solo shows — and they are quite a way away from the off centre dance-pop she’s best known for. The electronica is still there, but song structure is freeform, rhythm doesn’t dominate, and especially on THutM, there’s a sense of vaudevillian storytelling, of a psychedelic cabaret of the mind, though the actual stories are distinctly abstracted and impressionistic. In fact this album is closer to the smaller, more intimate moments in Moloko than to most of her solo work — but it’s a record that’s only grown with time, and together with HT made a bold statement about Murphy as a songwriter, performer, conceptualist and stylist in it for the one haul. Though she would return to the dance floor in a big way with Roisin Machine in 2020, it felt like she needed these albums to open up a space entirely her own.