Within the very first seconds of this album the harmonies arrive, shimmering and enormous, as Ella Williams’ voice and guitar are processed through a reverb chain of such considered beauty that it feels like standing in a wide open landscape. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is a folk shoegaze record that feels simultaneously intimate and enormously vast.

The title track opens the album weightless and drumless before Cleveland arrives as a clear single, with a chorus that hits with physical power as Ella’s voice carries a soft yearning that longs, delivered over a huge sound bath of distorted guitars that completely envelop you. Not Me pulls back to a stunning and intimate slide guitar working in tandem with the bassline, feeling rootsy and authentically traditional, and Helicopters is similarly intimate until it crashes into noise two minutes in. Ella’s lyrical delivery on this track crams too many syllables into the lines, more concerned with telling the story than fitting a neat syllabic structure, and it gives the track a real, quaking quality as if the words can’t quite contain what she’s trying to say.

Highway Woman has a melody as classic as the oldest end of the folk tradition, and Reelin incorporates Celtic instrumentation that sounds like the cold, northern border of America rather than the southern sounds of Americana that we’re more used to hearing. Ella’s regional accent also gives the record a specificity of place and a grounded authenticity that a lot of modern Americana lacks, as the album oscillates between intimate moments and enormous crescendos. Fought a Hornet is a track of lone weightless fingerpicked vocal harmonies with no drums, and Surfing USA rests completely on the beauty of its melody before Weightless, Untethered closes the album with the classic quality of Nick Drake, as a beautiful guitar line lies underneath a stunning vocal melody.

There are a lot of American female musicians releasing this kind of slow-motion folk music right now, and it’s arguably a crowded marketplace, but Squirrel Flower has delivered one of the best records we’ve heard in this tradition in a very long time, both powerful and gentle simultaneously. If you put it on in your headphones for a walk, you’ll struggle to move faster than a dawdle, and if you put it on at home you’ll probably find yourself unable to do anything other than staring at a point on the wall contemplating. That a record this gentle can grab your attention so completely for its entire runtime is a remarkable and brilliant achievement.

All of the biggest shoegaze bands are now playing bigger tours than they did in their own heyday, because the movement was so thoroughly disregarded at the time. The younger generation have found them and a whole new wave of artists are taking that influence in interesting directions rather than simply imitating it. Squirrel Flower is one of the finest examples, with one foot in the traditional folk camp, and the other in ear-blasting shoegaze, with a combination that belongs entirely to her generation rather than to either older template.