Michelangelo Dying

Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something”, without quite knowing what. Michelangelo Dying forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s Reward and 2022’s Pompeii, channelling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches”, “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”.