It was 2008. Indie music was topping the UK charts and the British public was about to fall in love with their homegrown “new folk” scene, predominantly led by the likes of Mumford & Sons, Noah & The Whale, and a teenage girl. The slight and preternaturally mature Laura Marling had left school at 16 and moved to London. She spent the next year writing songs built around her acoustic guitar and vocals for her debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim. Socializing with her folk contemporaries was wise positioning on her part: Both Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons and Charlie Fink of Noah & The Whale helped her make and record this album. Sonically speaking, Alas I Cannot Swim—which was nominated for the Mercury Prize (three more of Marling’s albums have been nominated since)—is both distinctly twinkly and emotionally rousing. These songs are personal and truthful but she is at a remove from them; a distance Marling would replicate on her second album, 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, and beyond. Characters appear and disappear; metaphors abound. Jaunty first single “Ghosts” describes a young man who “went crazy at 19” from his inability to forget his past loves to a bright finger-plucked melody. Elsewhere, on the sweet-natured acoustic song “Tap at My Window,” the speaker shuns Romeo and Juliet-style romantic gestures, knowing they don’t represent true love and intimacy. Marling follows up with the dark and stirring “The Captain and the Hourglass,” a mythic tale about a symbolic captain struggling to charter through the seas of his life (“You sat alone under billowing sky,” she sings). In one sense, this album is an endearing time capsule of a specific era. Glockenspiels and banjos feature (“Cross Your Fingers” and “Crawled out of the Sea” respectively), while there are gang vocals and left-in background noises. But more accurately, perhaps, it’s a deliberate, precise, and emotionally mature folk debut from a young artist who may yet become her generation’s Joni Mitchell.