On Her Side Maddie Ashman experiments, destabilises, and shifts the ground beneath your feet with microtonal intervals that bend the ear in unfamiliar directions. Operating close to the avant-pop of Björk, these are satisfying and melodic songs with a tonal centre that’s perpetually sliding and morphing.

The EP opens with Rumours, with stacked vocal harmonies that resemble a pipe reed organ, but something is off with gently unsettling notes that sit between notes. Microtonality has surfaced in recent years most famously in the experiments of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, but Ashman’s world is voice first with unpredictable studio textures shimmering and rearranging themselves mid-air. Each track feels like a new experiment in what can be detuned and reimaged with Jaded pivoting sharply into a manic jungle breakbeat while the chords drift in eerie half-movements that your brain wasn’t expecting.

Her Side is a playful technicolour pop fantasy with a bizarre tonal DNA. She Said strips things back and deploys a sparse vocoder that recalls James Blake, while Seraphim emerges as the detuned centrepiece as a piano cascades in carefully delicate unease and what should sound tender becomes slightly eerie and strange. In Autumn My Heart Breaks may be the EP’s most compositionally ambitious moment, the entire piece modulating continually upward through keys that don’t even have names in conventional Western notation in an astonishingly beautiful choral song that echoes the devotional minimalism of John Taverner.

The technical skill required to compose and perform in this fluid, unnamed harmonic space is immense, with Ashman detuning everything she can get her hands on across seven tracks. Piano, guitar, cello and effects pedals all add texture as her voice is stretched, layered, harmonised and reassembled in ways that are both ancient and futuristic. Her Side is unsettling, but it roots itself just enough in pop structure to remain colourful and inviting even as it pulls you into strange harmonic spaces you didn’t know existed.

Her Side is a compelling and strange philosophical EP, declaring that there are not just twelve notes. Maddie Ashman’s entire project feels like a joyful dismantling of musical limits, with microtonality as the foundational statement of possibility rather than simple decoration, building her radical musical identity around the notes between notes. Some tracks are hushed and intimate, built around drifting vocal lines and detuned piano whilst others are maximalist bursts of jungle breakbeats and studio trickery.

Testing how far each song can stretch without snapping, Her Side is dense with personality whilst avoiding the trap of feeling emotionally distant that experimental avant-pop often slips into. The EP radiates warmth beneath its uncanny surface with strange and bizarre songs. A brilliant opening chapter for the astonishing and unorthodox Maddie Ashman.