Album Review: Lisa Mitchell - Warriors

Mitchell has come a long way from the elfin teenage folk singer who placed sixth on the 2006 Australian Idol.

The Albury native has always had an ear for a good melody and a good line; here, with the help of US producer Eric J (Flume, Chet Faker), she largely abandons the comfort zone of her piano and acoustic guitar in favour of arrangements that are sparer and with more gloomy corners to offset her, at times, sugary pastel impulses. The result is her best release to date.

Single The Boys points the way. Its percussive plinks and jitter and the distorted murmur shadowing Mitchell's vocals lend a dark quality to an otherwise bright sounding song. It's an example of production aligned precisely to theme, setting the tone for a track that finds fragile reassurance in collective grief. Then the title track turns out to be not an anthem of empowerment, but a bleak lament for the passing of youth: "We were the kids from the country, keeping it real in the suburbs," Mitchell sings amid an elegiac fog of synth and vocal gasps.

She's clearly taken a leaf out of Lorde's book - sonically and thematically - and it has elevated her as both songwriter and performer. There are tinges of Beth Gibbons-like desolation on standout I Remember Love, and Mitchell, momentarily back in acoustic-folk mode, channels Martha Wainwright's sorrowful luminescence on torch song What Is Love. Her trademark wispy head-voice is still her go-to, but here the cutesiness gives way to something richer, and surely more enduring.