Laura Gibson is an acclaimed singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Portland, Oregon. For her fifth album, Goners, Gibson has produced a rich, dark and mysterious collection of songs around the theme of grief and the intimacy of shared loss which, despite the harrowing and unsettling subject matter, manages to create a sense of optimism and renewed hope. For many of the songs, she has set aside her trusty guitars in favour of piano and Wurlitzer and created a series of bold and imaginative soundscapes, peppered with multi-tracked vocals and flourishes of strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion and ambient samples and loops. This is Gibson’s first album since completing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and these new songs provide a masterclass in powerful, poetic and enigmatic storytelling, saturated in vivid and dream-like imagery. As Gibson herself has said: “I wanted to aim for wildness in my lyrics, not perfection.” The haunting and, at times, traumatic, narratives are offset cleverly by the caress of Laura Gibson’s intimate, graceful and feathery vocals.