Noga Erez Off The Radar

Noga Erez sounds like an Israeli, millennial Annie Lennox. Throaty and seductive, her whimsical, contralto voice, combined with the fractured, experimental production of ‘Off the Radar’, creates a record that sounds like a classic, even though it’s brand new. The opening track, ‘Balkana’, is a trippy, winding number that I can imagine playing over the closing credits of a road trip movie, while the soft, slow ‘Worth None’ showcases that deep, sexy voice to its fullest. The song ‘Pity’ – with its classic electro-pop sound – was influenced by a sexual assault where bystanders filmed the attack on smartphones instead of intervening.

This is politically infused music that takes sound seriously. The instrumentals are complex and surprising – the strangely compelling, heady, digitally enhanced beats on ‘Dance While You Shoot’, for example, seem to have been composed for a club remix (Pendulum, are you listening?). It makes this for a debut record that’s not afraid of combining pure fun with heavy topics, despite the occasionally baffling lyrics – “skinny cat in a dog’s land”, anyone?