- Desire, I Want To Turn Into You is the second LP by chimeric popstar Caroline Polachek, nearly two decades into her music career: first as a part of experimental duo Chairlift, then a writer for the likes of Beyoncé, and most recently, a solo artist. Her 2019 debut, Pang - which charted the period following her divorce with glistening, yearning neuroticism and euphoria - was critically acclaimed but somewhat relegated to the territory of cult pop-heads and PC-music devotees.

I can’t believe how long it's been since Desire’s first single, Bunny Is A Rider, dropped. In July 2021, the threat of lockdown still loomed over Brisbane and the track’s molten slickness felt like sweet escapism. Over the next eighteen months - buoyed by the TikTok virality of So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, a touring slot with Dua Lipa and festival appearances including Primavera and Glastonbury - Polachek drip-fed her expanded audience with tracks from the record, like breadcrumbs into the forest.

The first thing that stood out to me about the tracklist of the album was the song Fly To You, which features Grimes and Dido. Like Polachek’s team-up with Christine and the Queens and Charli XCX on 2022’s New Shapes, it’s an unexpected but effective collaboration. And Dido’s breathy lyric on the track gets closest to the conceit of the whole body of work: “I’m looking for something that nobody else can see”. On the record, Polachek and her longtime co-producer Danny Harle seek to weave a unique tapestry of past, present and future sounds. Enlisting bagpipes, celtic, chamber-style arrangements; Spanish guitars, a children’s choir and a vivid palette of '90's pop textures, they manufacture an uncanny paradise fit for her mythological songwriting.

Desire’s bratty opener, Welcome To My Island, launches us straight into that world. It begins with a guttural yell - Tarzan meets Ariana Grande - which makes me imagine the feeling of jumping from a tall rock into the ocean. Emerging from the wash, Polachek’s landscape comes into focus: across the record’s twelve tracks, she sketches images of “smoke floating over the volcano” and “a sky of vultures”. Lovers are found “sexting sonnets” to one another, clad in “denim and bows" and sporting navel rings, new tattoos, bloody noses. Her high octane vocal acrobatics are on display through, joined by a new, ethereal midrange which is just as entrancing.

Inspired by the scores of Spaghetti Westerns and Polachek’s temporary relocation to Barcelona, Sunset is anchored by its image of the distant horizon, a romance perfectly resolved by riding off into it. Pretty In Possible, with its disorientating appraisal of city life and looping, Tom’s Diner-esque refrain, reminds me of Lorde’s invocation of Natalie Imbrulgia-style 2000's radio hits for Solar Power. I Believe, closing out the A-side, is adorned with brassy synth stabs which may as well have been lifted straight from the bible of Britney or NSYNC, along with a pristinely earnest pop hook: ‘I believe we’ll get another day together’.

In moments like the more minimal Crude Drawing of An Angel and the elegiac Hopedrunk Everasking, we get the inevitable comedown from the highs of the record’s bombastic, delusional-girl-summer dance cuts. On Crude Drawing, Polachek is a siren bracing for abandonment, ready to be forsaken “here on the ground”.

Despite its doe-eyed, turn-of-the-millenium aesthetic references, Desire is imbued with a foreboding underbelly which feels more of its time. Recorded largely in hired studios while on tour with Dua, and following Polachek’s father’s death from Covid, there’s a manic chaos that honours the fragmented anxiety of contemporary social politics. Throughout the album’s collaged vignettes, Polachek is torn between seeking union and freedom. On Billions, she’s never felt so close to you. On Bunny, she’s off-grid, unavailable. The object of her desire is a moving target, spiralling towards and away from her on multiple planes. In response, Caroline seems to suggest that the real pleasure is in recognising the truth of many realities, many dreams and the many pathways that offer themselves to you on the island.

- Aleisha McLaren.