Nadine Shah worries that too much time might have elapsed between her last album, 2020’s universally acclaimed Kitchen Sink and its extraordinary successor Filthy Underneath. Attention spans seem to be ever shrinking and, besides, what gives her the right to think she can sashay back into action and imagine that anyone will care? Three years might seem like a prolonged absence to some people, but it’s also a period of time in which the apparatus that holds your world in place can be dismantled and reassembled so that you can keep living, keep creating. And the more Nadine tells you about the last three years of her life – losing her mother to cancer at the height of lockdown; the suicide attempt that ended her marriage (not, thankfully, her life); the subsequent period in rehab that slowly endowed her with the tools to outwit the pernicious voices that once overwhelmed her – the more incredible it is that she has returned as soon as she has done.
Back with a new label – the inaugural release on the newly-formed EMI North imprint – Filthy Underneath chronicles a period of unprecedented turbulence in Nadine Shah’s life. And yet, the experience of listening to it is oddly life-affirming – a parade of ghosts spanning the entirety of Nadine’s thirty-seven years, moving with balletic beauty to the music that Nadine and long-time collaborator and producer Ben Hillier have created around them.
