Melody Pool’s debut album is so laden with heartbreak and melancholy it may make your speakers weep. Her voice is an Emmylou Harris-like vessel that’s both frail and powerful, a quality she also achieves in her lyrics. Exhibit A is “Henry”, a message to a cheating lover that’s dripping with as much rage as it is heartache: “I thought you had sense/But your last pretence/Was to shatter my forgiveness for good.” Recorded in Nashville over a period of three days, the Australian singer-songwriter specialises in painting vivid emotional portraits, some of characters (“Xavier is a hard case/He lies to his own face/Has dreams that he won’t chase”), others aimed squarely inward: “You’re a stranger to me/And I need a little help/To understand that the man I came to love/Is actually somebody else,” she confesses in the title track. Closer “Pretty Little End” makes it clear that, despite being heartbroken, Pool is not some powerless flower wilting on the branch of a failed romance: “’Cause I feel so angry, feel so lonely/Bitterness raging in my gentle hands/And I rarely weep because I hate to feel weak/And I rarely smile because I hate denial.”