Across the Meridian

Arriving 11 years after 2007’s The Moving Frontier, Pram’s seventh album is their first without founding member Rosie Cuckston. Time and line-up changes have done nothing to temper the Birmingham indie band’s experimental spirit though. Broadening their arsenal of sounds to encompass everything from the Jazz Age to glitch pop, the quartet craft layered songs that mesh styles and eras, suggesting Edgar Allen Poe mixed with GarageBand (eerie waltz “Electra”) and a lost transmission from a Martian lounge band (“Wave of Translation”). The experimentation is always underpinned by robust songwriting, as illuminated by the stripped-back yearning of “Mayfly”.