Milly D

Harrow, north-west London · FARA Records

Milly D (22) is the youngest member of The Hourglass Society, from Harrow in north-west London, raised on the internet and on pop music in the ordinary way most people her age were. She started out with a bright, conventional topline voice — the kind suited to straightforward pop writing — and found her way into the collective's stranger register somewhat by accident, discovering along the way that the same voice turned down and drenched in reverb did something none of her earlier writing had access to.

Distant, airy, repeating — she doesn't carry melody so much as she carries a phrase that won't quite leave, looped and reverbed until it stops sounding like singing and starts sounding like a thought recurring. The effect depends entirely on restraint: any more voice and the eeriness collapses back into an ordinary vocal take. Her influences run the airier, more processed end of contemporary pop production, redirected here toward something closer to memory or intrusive thought than to hook-writing.

The youngest and, on record, the least grounded — by design, since her whole role in the group's sound is to be the part that floats rather than the part that holds. She discovered her eerier register more or less by accident, turning down a voice that was originally built for much brighter material. She's aware the effect only works because she doesn't oversing it, and resists the temptation every time. Young, airy, deliberately unstable.