Dressing despair up as dance music is an idea older than disco itself. Perched atop late 20th-century pop's giddy stalagmite of tears is Abba's The Visitors, a final album all about the misery of mutually assured destruction, of divorce and the cold war.
Indiana, aka Lauren Henson, is not quite in Abba's league. There is, though, a palpable Swedish pop influence to her intriguing debut album, No Romeo – the bittersweet variety of dance-pop that goes all the way back to Abba, not the chart-devouring fare of writers such as Max Martin. You could say Indiana has heard a Robyn track or two, specifically Dancing on My Own.
The primary reason that anyone – including the US industry bible Billboard, not normally given to fawning headlines such as "Your new favourite pop artist" – is talking about an obscure 27-year-old from Nottingham who, until three years ago, had never really played or sung a thing, is her April single, Solo Dancing, a UK top 20 hit (and 1m-plus YouTube views). It arrived fully formed, a disco confection that looked down its nose at all chancers. "No point in asking cos I always dance alone," Henson intones. It prompted the usual speculation as to whether the song is about, y'know, the other kind of autonomous pleasure. Billy Idol's 1981 hit Dancing With Myself could well have been about self-love (Idol has claimed it's the anomie of Japanese discos in the 80s). Solo Dancing, by contrast, is a declaration of autonomy. Indiana is the sort of woman who once had a half-shaved head, after all; her image has since recalibrated to conventional femininity.
The album's title succinctly sums up No Romeo's attitude to romance. It's not all roses, by some margin. The song of the same name comes in on a Giorgio Moroder pulse and gives some hapless man both barrels. "I don't need to compromise," sniffs Indiana, before she half quotes Blondie's Call Me in an inversion of that song's doormat availability. "Don't cover me with roses/ Stolen kisses in the dark… I know who you are."
The world is awash in brooding electronic pop about romantic hurt, pop that's sung in a desolate coo, that's a little bit trip-hop and a lot digital, all strategies on Indiana's checklist. Over the course of 13 tracks, No Romeo does not sound like the wheel being reinvented overmuch. But Indiana is just a little more pissed off than your average comer. The album opens with real venom. "I'll rain a thousand curses on your soul/ Your sons and daughters will be broken/ From now on and evermore," she promises on Never Born. Her falsetto that tilts at Beth Gibbons and her lower register mean business. Other times, Indiana is utterly spent. Play Dead finds her "cold to the pain". These are emo levels of desolation, all gussied up in synths. She is just original enough to intrigue, even as she quotes plenty of pop gone by. "Don't push me cos I'm close to the edge," she quavers, desolately, on Heart on Fire. (One of the album's more curious tracks, Calibrated Love, even finds Indiana claiming: "I am the creator of blurred lines/Blurred lines".)
All this has seemingly come out of nowhere. Some months ago, Henson posted a cover of a song called Gabriel on the internet. Its author, Grammy-nominated John Beck, got in touch and a partnership was born. Henson is a little older than your average pop debutante, a mother of two and, until recently, a T-shirt designer. Her father died when she was 17, an event that seems pivotal to her bleak worldview. He liked the Indiana Jones films, hence her moniker. Her debut should end on the inventive Shadow Flash rather than the overcooked Mess Around. It could lose a lot of the moody filler clogging up the spaces between the substantial songs. But it's a worthy addition to the pile of pop that uses flashing coloured lights as cover for sighing and seething.
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