The Staves: All Now – Life-affirming songs from Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor

Following the departure four years ago of their sister, Emily Staveley-Taylor, Jessica and Camilla are now the constituent parts of the indie folk-pop duo The Staves. If you think there might be a lack of creative or musical heft, however, you’ll need to reconsider. All Now is, perhaps by necessity, tougher and spikier than anything the group has previously recorded – no one is saying there was a requirement to unleash a sonic mugging, but it isn’t just about the music.

For their fifth album – created throughout most of 2023, with Covid-19, but not necessarily the grief and emotional turmoil of the pandemic, well and truly in the background – Jessica and Camilla focus on numerous aspects of womanhood and their collective place in an industry that since the release of their fourth album, Good Woman, in 2021, has seen them being dropped by a major label, Atlantic Records.

The opening track, All Now, drips with disdain for music-business tactics. “Still the value on the package and the camera on the skin,” they sing in harmony. “Still the focus on the eye, not the biscuit just the tin. And I’m standing here screaming, where do we begin?” The frustration is corralled to great effect on a batch of songs produced by John Congleton, who also worked on Good Woman, that graft The Staves’ signature melodies and harmonies on to unfamiliar but noteworthy territory.

Make a Decision is like a prog-era Genesis track gifted with sturdy guitar riffs and squirrelly solos, while The Echo is Kate Bush fused with Talk Talk – and all the lovelier for it, with lyrics that linger anxiously on love lost (“I wait to find out how I’m going to sleep without you, and I wait to find out how am I to be without you”). Other highlights and surprises on this serious but life-affirming album include After School, as commercial a rock-pop song as The Staves have ever recorded, and So Gracefully, a dreamy electronic tune that begs to be remixed and set free in clubland.