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Elisa Ambrogio, Magik Markers’ power front, lyric intelligence, guitar g’rilla and awkward weirdo, is back, and forth too, to deposit her first full length solo outing on your doorstep. ‘The Immoralist’ lies at the wicked crossroads of the electric wail of Wilson Pickett and the sweetest harmony of Wilson Phillips.

Ambrogio exhibits a new refinement on ‘The Immoralist’. Working with Papercuts’ Jason Quever, Elisa’s earliest childhood musical loves The Poni-Taies, Tiffany and The Dixie Cups rise through the haze-nraze of electric guitar and drums with a pop repercussion previously unexplored by Magik Markers. Glossy melodies, drums that throb with the rhythmic stamp of a celibate sect and layers of vocals joined in harmony over stark sound-beds engage a whole new quadrant of Starship Ambrogio. Meanwhile, the endocrine hiss of Love’s ‘Baby Soft’ and heart-caught-in-throat emulsion sweats from the tracks, taking Cale’s conceit of fear as man’s best friend and playing fetch with it.

Flashes of the youthful innocent and her shadow illuminate ‘The Immoralist’s early moments, ‘Superstitious’ and ‘Reservoir’. With ‘Mary Perfectly’, at long last we take the guitar player for a ride. Over the cheerleader chants and locust synth of ‘Comers’, a dreamy meditation on agency, she writes a song about a horse and admits it is a hack move to write a song about a horse in one breath. Not every album can successfully write love songs about examples of irrigation but Ambrogio pulls it off seamlessly on tracks like ‘Reservoir’ and ‘Arkansas’.

As ‘The Immoralist’ moves through its masterfully sequenced narrative arc, disparate elements are pulled into focus: a suburban dad playing the steering wheel of a Pontiac 2000 is echoed in the opening drum beat of ‘Stopped Clocks’, while the coiled freedom of improvised piece ‘Kylie’ captures at long last the poetic resonance of applying lip gloss and features Ambrogio’s long-heralded but neverbefore captured cello playing. ‘Far From Home’ evokes the loneliness and confusion of waking up in a dark field and feeling your way back to civilization - along with a nebulous-yet-unshakeable vibe of romance.