A notable recent trend in pop music has been the rise of the heartfelt singer songwriter, offering songs about ordinary lives and love without any fancy trimmings or concern about their image. Of course all of them hitting the top of the charts have been male. You don’t see many women in any genre just standing on stage in a hoodie playing their guitar and gently singing from the heart.

Joy Oladokun’s new album ‘Proof of Life’ offers us a female version of that kind of honest, understated anti-style. What makes her even more interesting than those crop of solo singer songwriters is the inventive and fresh sound she creates on this record – taking pop, folk, indie and jazz influences and fusing them into something new of her own.

On her previous releases Esther Rose perfected a cool yet catchy sound through a sweet combination of light pedal steel, fiddle, soft vocals and vintage Americana production. On her new album ‘Safe to Run’ she continues this aesthetic, while also expanding her horizons – her newly blonde hair and a change of location from New Orleans to Santa Fe perhaps inspiring a new sense of artistic looseness and freedom.

More than most in the music industry, Iris DeMent is a thinker. Her musical output is slower than most, not because of indifference, but because she makes sure she has something worthy to share with the listener first. Of these songs on her new album ‘Workin’ on a World’ Iris has said: “Not everybody’s going to get them, but there’s people that get them – and they need them.”