Ego Ella May's sophomore album, Honey for Wounds, finds her smooth, sage voice chronicling societal ills and personal heartache in clever, poetic lyrics that conjure a reflective, communal ambience to leave the listener with a sense of solace.

May's fluid vocals are backed by velvety basslines and a number of collaborators, whose measured solos round out the album's warm, crystalline soul. On ‘Table for One’, Oscar Jerome and Joe Armon Jones play shimmering strains and Eddie Hicks' tight drumming crests into satisfying full stops.

In ‘Tonight I'm Drowning’, trumpeter Theo Croker (who plays on several other tracks) pianist Ashley Henry delicately match her climbing, melancholy melody.

‘Girls Don't Always Sing About Boys’ showcases May's lyrical talent. A lesser writer's catalogue of crises like inequality, Grenfell Tower, homelessness, climate change, and music industry hypocrisies could easily render a song into a rant. May, however, packages droll observations in celestial turns of voice and with a cool remove that keeps the listener easily nodding along to the ‘nice beat behind’ her that May references – ‘so you'll still buy me’.