The 50 best albums of 2023, No 3 – Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

This album begins with a sizzle reel of what Caroline Polachek can do with her voice. Floating serenely on a high thermal of coos, it dips down in pitch and speeds towards the earth, cracking as Polachek pushes it into the red. She pulls up with a Celtic folk ululation and heads back into the sky again, higher than ever, reaching the whistle register of Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande. After a final soulful flourish, the drums kick in and she begins merely talking: “Welcome to my island.”

It is exhilarating to be hoisted in the air and carried on the back of pure talent like this. Pop today has a lot of really quite similar voices – either pained and earthy (men), or vocal-fried and arch (women) – making Polachek’s voice stand out all the more. On opener Welcome to My Island and throughout her fourth solo album, she’s technically immaculate, tracing complex melodies as if matching the light-trail of a sparkler wielded by a toddler, but she’s never showing off. The meaning of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You itself is carried in how these vocal lines search high and low, babbling in excited melody, yearning hard to reach top notes, or occasionally speaking in a careful monotone: this is a drama about the all-consuming nature of desire, played out across the very topography of Polachek’s perfect voice.

There are emphatic, knowingly corny billets-doux: “You’re my sunset, fiery red, forever fearless / And in your arms, a warm horizon,” goes the chorus of Sunset, backed by flamenco guitar. “Violent love, feel my embrace,” she sings on I Believe, setting off more vocal fireworks. Blood and Butter has this magnificently OTT couplet: “Let me dive through your face / To the sweetest kind of pain.” She’s forever diving or running or flying; volcanoes erupt more than once across the album’s lyrics.

Related: Caroline Polachek: ‘Seeing Fiona Apple and Björk succeed without compromise felt so aspirational’

Polachek goes deeper still into her distinctively odd, intense brand of poetry. “Lying at the foot of a linden / In a navel ring inventing June / Where did you come from, you?” she sings in a surrealist scene on Blood and Butter. She’s described the lambent ballad Crude Drawing of an Angel as “scorny” – that’s scary and horny – and its lyrics as imagining a very specific scene: “Watching someone wake up, not realising they’re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that’s probably the last time you’re going to see them.” As if to try to get at the complexity and intensity of her feelings, she invents a series of neologisms: “Mythocological”, “cornucopeiac”, “Wikipediated”, “hopedrunk”. It’s almost shocking when a relatively simple metaphor comes along, on Butterfly Net: “There you were, with your mirror / Shining the world all over me / There I was with my butterfly net / Trying to catch your light.”

That’s still more complex than most pop in the charts, of course. Her most popular song remains the more clearly understandable So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, from 2019; for all their ultra-catchiness, perhaps these newer songs are too knotty to connect with the masses in the same way as, say, Dua Lipa, who Polachek has supported on tour. The production (chiefly by Polachek and Danny L Harle) also lays pop elements at strange, oblique angles to one another. There are kitsch juxtapositions everywhere – 80s orchestral hits set against UK garage beats, Billions’ clashing orientalisms, Dido guesting alongside Grimes – that might scan as ironic, but are ardently sincere.

This is perhaps Polachek’s lane: being the bard for a generation of digitally savvy, cultural cherry-pickers for whom irony is so dull, even hateful, compared with loving something intensely. While others fuss and grouch on the poolside, Polachek dives into life, thrilling in the rush of cold, the bubbles on her skin and the subsequent clarity of mind.