Released on Kurt Rosenwinkel's independent label Heartcore Records, this latest album from Swiss-born, Berlin-based vocalist, bandleader and songwriter Lucia Cadotsch showcases her new quartet featuring keyboardist Kit Downes, bassist Phil Donkin and drummer James Maddren.

Cadotsch and Downes are long-standing musical partners who co-wrote most of the album. Cadotsch notes that opener ‘I Won't’ serves “as a mantra, a promise to myself to remind me and help me stop fulfilling expected social roles”. It's a mantra that's punctuated by some breathtakingly fleet right-hand runs from Downes. The metrical games of ‘No Apology’ highlight the striking rhythmical reciprocity between Cadotsch and her musicians, while her interpretation of the heart-wrenching ‘Ballad of the Drowned Girl’, inspired by the murder of the revolutionary socialist and anti-war activist Rosa Luxemburg, and excerpted from Weill/Brecht's Das Berliner Requiem, impresses due to its vocal and textural restraint. ‘Lily of the Nile’ exemplifies the notable rapport between vocalist and pianist and elicits some especially beautiful playing from Downes in enveloping Cadotsch's crystalline timbre. Guitarist and mentor Rosenwinkel guests on a brace of songs, the remarkably sepulchral ‘Bitter Long Lying Leisure’ and ‘Medusa's Champagne’, in which Cadotsch reimagines the fearsome mythical being as a sensual creature.