If the name Alice Gold feels familiar, then it’s for good reason. Her Dan Carey-produced debut Seven Rainbows landed in 2011, propelling Gold to Glastonbury’s Other Stage, tours with Eels/Noah & The Whale. BBC Music hailed the record as “transcend[ing] any accepted conventions of ‘female singer-songwriter’, to lay the foundations for a rock star”; the following year she co-wrote and provided vocals for Sub Focus’s UK Top 20 hit ‘Out Of The Blue’. Everything seemed on track – and then she disappeared.

Gold’s life and art have always been closely intertwined. After losing her mother at 23, she bought a one-way ticket to Nashville and spent six months driving across America alone in a 1978 Dodge Winnebago, writing songs that secured her first major-label deal with Parlophone.

Years later, as she prepared to start a family, Gold was diagnosed with severe hip dysplasia. She was plunged into motherhood without a mum and underwent two major hip operations, relearning to walk each time. For years, music disappeared.

But slowly, the songs returned. Moving from London to her ancestral home of Kent, putting down roots reignited something further, and Gold began making Faultlines – her second album, arriving 15 years and an emotional lifetime after her debut.

Self-produced and recorded in analogue takes with friend Dan Carey’s guiding hand, Faultlines is Gold’s most intimate work yet. Earthy, vulnerable and quietly hopeful, it explores family life against a backdrop of Covid, war, climate change and AI.

Fifteen years after Seven Rainbows, Faultlines isn’t so much a comeback as an artist returning with a deeper understanding. Faultlines finds strength in vulnerability and a soundtrack for finding a way through to the other side.