Sevdaliza returns with her cryptic and angular second full-length Shabrang. Across her second LP, the Iranian-Dutch songwriter and producer moves her brand of electronic, avant-garde R&B beyond the notable trip hop influences of her 2017 debut. Tying together an omnivorous appetite for style and genre through the strength of her creative vision alone, she covers traditional Farsi ballads, apocalyptic club music, internet age alt-pop and more. Constructing sparse, avant-pop landscapes interspersed with skittish beats, icy synths and cavernous bass, Sevdaliza carries the record with her mournful, autotuned vocals. While Sevdaliza dresses Shabrang in musical minimalism, she places emotional maximalism at the centre of the album. Unyielding in her determination to authentically channel her rawest self into her art, Shabrang presents a series of lithe, existential meditations on good and evil, innocence and guilt, power and powerlessness, and the extremities of emotion. Heartrending, bruising and vulnerable, Shabrang asks each of us to look at ourselves with just a fraction of the incisiveness and self-interrogation as Sevdaliza does throughout her second LP