Some records require a journey.​ Are You in Love?, Basia Bulat’s extraordinary, glittering new album, required two: the Canadian singer went to the Mojave Desert and then she went away –turning inward, shaking off the shadows, looking out to dawn.

“Oh, why didn’t I just listen to myself in the first goddamn place,” she says today. Somewhere in the middle of making her fifth album, Bulat took almost a whole year off. Because she had fallen in love, because her father died, because she had lost her sense of beauty and where it might be hidden. “The desert exposes you,” she admits. “There’s nowhere to hide.”

“Throughout this whole record, I was struggling between keeping it together and letting go,” she explains, “between holding on to old narratives or accepting what’s before me.” There was death and grief, but also forgiveness, reinvention and love […]”