The field of UK jazz-soul singer-songwriters isn’t especially populous or ambitious, despite Gregory Porter’s success here proving the genre’s accessibility to a large public. Raised in Italy and Denmark, Irene Serra’s singing and songs are complementary, her voice’s smoky drift limning detached numbness and concealed wounds caused by love. There is a masochistically beaten tone to her lyrics, an admitting of devotion’s cost as it leaves feelings of unworthiness and rejection. Performed midway between jazz and soul mode, she occupies terrain Billie Holiday would find familiar; Sade too. The rest of ISQ, including former Neil Cowley bassist Richard Sadler and Yazz Ahmed’s keyboardist Naadia Sheriff, maintain a steadily rolling yet staccato undercurrent, in arrangements suggesting their own kind of wry acceptance, as if shadowing and commenting on Serra’s woes. Sheriff is especially important, her piano a strong, supporting voice as Serra’s bereft murmurs evaporate in ‘Stone’, and adding slow, glinting ripples to the ticking emotional time-bomb of ‘Loving a Stranger’.

Like her whole band, Serra applies jazz technique to what are essentially pop songs (like a century of jazz singers before her), finding a line’s rhythmic shape around often stately beats, which toll like church bells at the album title’s requiem. The closing ‘Lost Where We Belong’ typifies Serra’s unfashionable ambivalence, as her voice describes a redemptive dying fall, and she stands strong in a relationship’s ruins. Happiness remains possible, but not here.