“Who am I? I am no one! What do I want? A human head!” chants Cathy Lucas, singsong and sinister, half-way through Vanishing Twin’s third album Ookii Gekkou. Japanese for ‘big moonlight’, the record imagines what life would be like if we lived in permanent nightfall, with only the phases of the moon for guidance. It sounds like things would get weird – fast.

Even more surreal than the London band’s psychedelic 2016 debut and less concise than 2019’s sharper Age of Immunology, Ookii Gekkou finds the now-four piece drifting from potential future to potential future. Lead single Phase One Million captures a desperate desire to find spiritual meaning in random events – “word, dance, touch, chance, colour of the sky”– while drummer Valentina Magaletti conjures the loose, warm percussion of a street parade on In Cucina. Tracks like The Organism and Tub Errupt lean a little too heavily on robotic, alien tropes, but Wider Than Itself is like nothing else: hyperpop sheen combined with chamber pop orchestration and the faint buzz of machinery, plus lyrics taken from The House of Fameby Middle Ages poet Geoffrey Chaucer, of course.

It’s absolutely far too much. Eccentric and indulgent. But with creative maximalists like Vanishing Twin, more is (almost) always more.

Katie Hawthorne