“I didn’t know the trouble I was causing, didn’t know that I could do that.” (Prize Hunter)

The opening of Prize Hunter, the lead song and single from Emma Pollock’s first album in 9 years, is sung over a sprightly bass line that belies a rich compendium that is the songwriter’s most personal and expressive collection to date. Recorded over five years against a backdrop of personal tumult, family grief and self-revelations, Begging The Night To Take Hold documents hardships but also points to glints of light in the darkness.

Recorded during and immediately after the Covid pandemic at Chemikal Underground's Chem19, Begging The Night To Take Hold takes the artist’s musical imagination and develops it into a baroque landscape, an invocation of physical and psychic place. With longterm collaborator Paul Savage in the producer and drummer’s chair, Pollock fleshed out her songs with instrumentation by Pete Harvey (cello, Modern Studies) and Graeme Smillie (piano & bass). The ideas and tonal shifts cascade in linear fashion, flowing in a technicolour deep and evocative. It’s a richness that Pollock has always played with, both solo and in The Delgados, but here it’s given an enhanced poignancy that only a period of upheaval can instigate.

In the nine years since her 3rd album In Search of Harperfield, Emma Pollock experienced the death of her father, a period of personal disruption and, after the album sessions wrapped, an Autism diagnosis that resulted in self-revelations that reverberate throughout the record. The album’s title is hewn from the lyrics of Black Magnetic: with its reference to the call of the void, the song plays with shades of black but points to a notion at the heart of the album: the night be "an anesthetic” but it also promises renewal. Though the song is one of the oldest on the album, its themes are at its heart.

Prize Hunter’s revelations are a case in point. Although written pre-Autism diagnosis, Pollock asks “what does a rainbow sound like” and answers herself “start at the beginning until you sing sunlight”. The interior dialogue of the song describes a need to catalogue and organise the world in order to perceive it: “Sitting on my shelf my accumulated wealth / All the words and numbers you could want / But I sometimes wonder if they endanger my health”. A description of Pollock’s evolving self-awareness, the interior conversation on display yields the solution to the problem: Start at the beginning, keep going. Similarly, on Future Tree there are “too many numbers and not enough poetry”, as the writer is trapped in her own perception of the world.

The deeply personal Rapid Rush Of Red details the universal experience of conflict with those we love. Over lush piano and cello reminiscent of 60s Scott Walker, a conflict is pulled apart by a narrator describing the overwhelming emotion in the heat of the moment. The real power of the song is not in dwelling on the pain but, through examining her own part in the disagreement, in yearning for a change in her own behaviour. “Is it possible to train a sprinter to slow down or a dancer to stay standing when the music comes around,” she intones. Over a surging chorus, Pollock searches for new colours to paint with. With the arrangements swirling underneath the chorus, those colours feel overwhelming and new.

While the album is Pollock's most autobiographical so far, there are still a multiplicity of voices. Marchtown's layered narratives and novelistic sense of place are planted in the streets of Glasgow. Evoking Mary Queen Of Scots, the song cuts between the Battle of Langside in the 16th Century and the narrators’ life in the same area, 400 years later. The two interweaving narratives paint a sense of psycho-geographical place, like living in your favourite novel. On Jessie My Queen, the songwriter’s ahistoric relationship with the Glaswegian illustrator Jessie M. King - an unsung but important artist active in the early 20th century - is a frame for Pollock to explore her own femininity.

More than any previous album, Pollock’s prowess as a musician and singer is in full bloom here. On Pages Of A Magazine, her vocal curls up into the fold of the chorus, both confident and fragile. The timbre, while instantly recognisable, is richer, bolder. On the pared-down Fire Inside, accompanied only by Smillie and Harvey, the singer’s voice is a masterful instrument as it describes the suffocation of conservatism. With Savage’s sensitivity in the production, it - like the album - strikes the perfect balance in tone: ambiguous yet powerfully universal.

Begging The Night To Take Hold heralds a new phase in Emma Pollock’s craft. Masterful and enveloping, it’s a record that emerges after a period of uncertainty infused with confidence. Pollock’s finest work to date describes darkness and multiple enriching ways out of it. It’s an album that implores us not to fear the night but to be renewed by it.

Begging The Night To Take Hold is released on vinyl, CD and digital on 26th September.