The last time I saw Aldous Harding perform was on a Thursday evening in March at Wellington's City Gallery. Clad entirely in white, and seated on stage with a guitar across her knee, Harding captivated the packed room with her elastic, shape-shifting voice and delicately plucked notes.As compelling as the material from her debut album was – haunted vignettes that let 60s/70s English folk music, ornamental sean-nós singing, and dense ancient language dovetail together – the high watermark moments of her set were newer. Built on the foundation of her debut, they unfolded with the logic of a dream, and a disregard for the olde world phrasing she'd previously employed. Singing in an unsettling upper register, Harding asked the listeners, "If there is a party, will you wait for me?" Several songs later, she offered a frightening thought in a jazzy cadence. "What if birds aren't singing they're screaming?"A couple of months later, I called her in the UK, where she's been busy playing shows to promote the May 19 release of her new album Party through 4AD, the legendary British independent record label that gave us the likes of Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Dead Can Dance, St Vincent, and Grimes.After listening to Party, I found myself thinking about the differences between her old and new songs. I wanted to know more, specifically how her use of language in song had shifted from ancient to something more conversational and contemporary. "It's interesting you bring up the language thing," she says. "When I was making my first record, I think I felt slightly trapped by my mind and my genre. I think in one way, that archaic language I was using came from a kind of mild obsession with the devil."Continue reading on NOISEY.