Cassandra Jenkins, a veteran musician who’s played in the bands of Eleanor Friedberger, Craig Finn, Lola Kirke, and rehearsed to tour with Purple Mountains in August 2019 before the tour’s cancellation, spent months meticulously making her debut LP Play Till You Win. For Phenomenal Nature, she arrived at engineer Josh Kaufman’s (The National, The Hold Steady) studio with ideas rather than full songs – nevertheless, they finished the album in a week.

Jenkins’ voice floats amid sensuous chamber pop arrangements and raw-edged drums, ferrying us through impressionistic portraits of friends and strangers. Her lyrics unfold magical worlds, introducing you to a cast of characters like a local fisherman, a psychic at a birthday party, and driving instructor of a spiritual bent. In their Rising feature on Jenkins, Pitchfork said: “The idea of decentering the self comes up again and again as a guiding principle… she acts as an ethnographer archiving quotidian sounds and conversations as much as a songwriter telling her own story.”