Pop music has become increasingly formulaic with hyper-clean production and familiar chord sequences. Gia Ford is writing according to a much older rulebook, with a deep understanding of the power of melody and the subtle meanings contained within less regular chord movements.

A Room Within A Room is an album that could slot comfortably into a nostalgic radio show dedicated to the sounds of the sixties, seventies, or eighties without anyone batting an eyelid, except perhaps to note how cleanly recorded it sounds for the time. Gia Ford’s deep, rich voice is the central instrument, solemn and serious, deploying a professional and poised vibrato that never tips into talent show theatrics or top 40 showboating. She doesn’t show off, and what surprises given the gravity of her voice and the seriousness of the subject matter is how groovy and fun the instrumentation is. It’s grand and ambitious, but there’s also a lightness of touch that stops the record from ever feeling indulgent or mopey.

Liberty opens with piano flourishes, and Diamonds Coming Down has a clavichord and a horn section with the deep groove of Barry White. At Least For Now feels of the sixties in its sensibility, and Shell moves between major and minor in really intriguing ways with a chorus that sounds like a sunrise or a flower blooming paired with the lyrics “I’ve been a shell all day, I’ve been in hell all day”. This combination of beauty and bleakness feels like The Walker Brothers, and A Spy In The House Of Love leans fully into the tradition of great Bond themes with a big stomping can-can, carrying the cinematic grandeur of Shirley Bassey. God is an absolute highlight with twitchy pauses where all the instruments drop out completely, and a film noir intimacy before a huge chorus with instrumentation that swells like a Robbie Williams song.

I Guess My Time Has Come is a twinkling love song with darkness running beneath even the warmest moments. How Do I Reply? has a light and jolly quality that points to Fleetwood Mac or Hall & Oates, brilliant, simple pop songwriting, with a moment near the end where the drummer begins a fill and passes the last note to the bass before the final chorus arrives, sharing a rhythmic phrase around the whole band. The drummer is playing the hell out of the kit, and the band have loads of personality in their performance.

Versions Of You closes the album and takes its time doing so as the longest and most expansive track on the record, moving at a tempo where none of the instruments are playing anything quickly. Deliberately slow, the song sounds like lonely thoughts in a wide open landscape, someone standing on a windy cliff looking out to sea and considering the vastness of it all. The whole album’s worth of instruments return in full force for the final chorus, feeling like religious gospel before spending its last minute on an airy coda that warms everything down to a close, feeling like the kind of ending that makes you sit with the credits instead of reaching for your phone.

You sense that part of Gia Ford’s thesis is to remind people how songs used to be written, when popular songwriting was so obviously impressive that it was easy to declare the right people geniuses. That tradition is much less visible now, and Gia Ford is flying its flag without peers on one of the richest and most rewarding records of the year.