Excuse my clumsiness; I forgot how to be a writer because I’ve been working too hard doing other things these last two weeks, and I’m not as young and able as I was to live two lives, write features on the bus, etc etc etc. You have a few years out of that, in freelance world, and once that spell is broken there’s no going back because you’re used to doing whatever it is you’re doing seriously and single-mindedly, so you spend a few weeks being an efficient project manager and getting up at 6.30am and you’re like, writing? what writing’s that, then? The only things you manage to get done being meditations upon the weird birch-flanked viaduct between Selhurst and South Norwood or somewhere, or a postcard to your mum or an email to your lover: small, hysterical or dreamy little things in your writerly Moleskine notebook, nothing with shape, style or substance, all first impression, bravado (caused by tiredness, lack of time and alienation from colleagues) and unsupportable hypotheses, bordered by To Do lists for commissioning Issue 9 surreptitiously whenever you get a second.

After a while you start to feel a bit dangerous, subterranean and lost (and grubby, like a grub, like something that’s going to turn into a sticky black fly any day now), and you get the new Liars single in the post and it’s dark like when you have to get up early, or when you go for a walk in the afternoon and forget it’s evening and suddenly there are pointy shadows on the street and a soft lead mist over the river and you shiver and walk fast and you plead with something that you can’t name to please let you have your words back and please make the day a bit longer.

I never knew, and still don’t know, if the Liars and their slight scariness was really scary, really itchy and jolty, or whether it just purported to be. But the singing bowl thing that rings and scrapes (a total surprise amid the oily beats and the sepulchral vocals) towards the end of the track - or is it the middle, there appear to be two sections - makes the track worthy of itself in a wholly inexplicable way; makes me put it on three times in a row. Everything else on there is wonderful too: murk with an understanding of how to pierce that murk with something so ragged and rust-edged that tetanus and paranoia are the only outcomes. Ouch. It’s so slight and it’s so sick. It’s out November 21.