Jazmine Mary: I Want to Rock And Roll (digital outlets)

Auckland's Jazmine Mary (Australian-born Jazmine Phillips, identifying as they/them) has confounded and impressed over her previous two albums: her downbeat The Licking of a Tangerine picked up Best Independent Debut at the 2022 Taite Prize and their recommended follow-up DOG appeared in many best-of lists in 2023.

Their music is along the axis of noir-folk, kinda gloomy but always interesting and delivering something different.

So anyone expecting something like Joan Jett or Suzi Quatro on the basis of the louche, rebel-gal album cover hasn't been paying attention.

Experimental, ethereal and quite hypnotic, their songs can have an untethered quality as they sing lengthy lines and make sudden vocal leaps (Narcotics Anonymous Meeting) or arrive as a whisper.

The distinctive arrangements here are diverse as suits the material: Back of the Bar sits atop a tricky percussive rhythm (“your biggest mistake was thinking you knew what I meant”), June is a piano ballad with repetitious strings for added tension and the impressive Memphis, with glistening pedal steel and strings, rides a simple but affecting melody with a sense of defeat: “That's it, I quit, I can't handle it. This love, this love . . .”

Recorded in Auckland's Roundhead Studios with Louisa Nicklin, Dave Khan and others, I Want to Rock And Roll is a neatly misdirecting title, much like the cover of DOG where they posed with a fish.

There's barely a punchy backbeat in earshot, not even on the low menace of the title track.

But that hardly matters because this mysterious, slightly surreal collection adds further depth to Jazmine Mary's deftly crafted catalogue of distinctive alt.folk.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.