Produced by Snowpoet's Chris Hyson, the Bosnian-Slovenian vocalist and songwriter Mirna Bogdanović's follow-up to her award-winning 2020 debut, Confrontation, is packed with ear-catching sonorities and visceral emotion. With its found sounds, soulful vocal exhortation and resounding piano chords, ‘I Love’ sets the tone for Awake, an album that captivates you from its very first notes. One of several songs to feature the captivating playing of the Rothko String Quartet and drenched in a cavernous reverb, the multipartite, many-layered, shape-shifting ‘Clocks’ shows Bogdanović to be a composer of enormous imagination.

In ‘Crazy Chords’, Bogdanović's circuitous vocalese is flawlessly doubled by guitarist Meyer. With its vocal line beautifully decorated by folk-like ornamentation, ‘Moving On’ is an all-consuming meditation on a past relationship which builds inexorably into a paroxysm of heartache. Written by Ivan Matias and Andrea Martin, and originally recorded by Angie Stone on her 2001 album, Mahogany Soul, the album's sole cover, ‘Wish I Didn't Miss You’ acts as a perfect thematic counterweight to ‘Moving On’ and is blessed with a fine instrumental break courtesy of alto saxist Asger Uttrup Nissen.

Underpinned by Paul Santner's interweaving, moto perpetuo ukulele lines, ‘On My Own’ possesses a lilting melancholy. Acting as a tiny prelude before the closing song, the title track offers the album's most idiosyncratic sound-world with its gamelan-like tintinnabulations, before the forward-looking ‘Finding Closure’ brings this fine album to a fitting close.