Her latest single is a scorched vision of global warming Britain, through the eyes of lounge revivalism and a doomsday prepping protagonist.

Ellie Bleach is back with a shuffling curveball of a new single, ‘Pamela’, which welds apocalyptic dread to a cocktail-hour Latin rhythm. Last year’s debut EP ‘No Elegant Way To Sell Out’ cemented Bleach’s reputation as one of the finest songwriters of the moment, and this new tune leans further still on her capacity to match literary world-building to intelligent song construction. Though you may find the song a little more janky than Bleach’s recent rich ballads, it is unmistakably hers for the depth of ideas conveyed and their being done so with room for deadpan gags.

The sonic gear shift is initiated with Bleach’s first use of lead guitar since 2017’s ‘Duvet Day’ as a breezy arpeggio settles in over a lounge groove. Having hinted at the style on last year’s cruise ship ballad ‘Precious Feelings’, on this track Bleach fully commits to this reference point. The result is somewhat reminiscent of the self-conscious but affectionate revival of lounge styles in the ‘80s and ‘90s. As it turns out, the sultry sound is there to set the scene of an overheating Britain in the throes of global warming.

The song does not have the same narrative direction that drives much of Bleach’s work, feeling more like a sketch of an imagined world, one not too far removed from our own. Having previously focused on what she saw as almost comically overdone literary tropes from years gone by, the topic here is far more current. This perhaps accounts for the reluctance to treat it as wholly coherent. Her scene-setting descriptions and apocalyptic language recall science fiction works like ‘The Last of the Winnebagos’ and ‘The Drowned World’, which imagine overheated, post-technological human societies. That said, the song also finds kinship in themes and delivery with Courtney Barnett’s ‘Dead Fox’, which is set firmly in the present. In ‘Pamela’, it is hard to tell whether the description of, “Summers in Essex, hotter and drier than Texas” refers to last year’s heatwave or an imagined future. The contemporary dread about climate disaster and the uncertainty of exactly how it will manifest itself is captured in this obliqueness and magnified by our hero, Pamela.

Bleach’s central character is not quite the hopeless romantic type that recurs throughout her discography, but certainly perceives her world in more dramatic terms than the rest of her community. She is a doomsday prepper who carries an axe and attracts an inordinate amount of male attention working at the local car wash…. “Armageddon never looked so good.” Bleach casts her as an outsider while actively sympathising (“Pamela how can you stand it? Everyone thinks you’re totally batshit”), suggesting that she is perhaps the only one not lying to herself about the terminal situation at hand.

What is an Ellie Bleach song if it doesn’t melt its troubled subject matter in a bubbling delight of melodic compliments to close? Here, the outro fully subscribes to Pamela’s argument, leaving two fingers in the air as languid backing vocals echo that those who contradict her will be the “first to go”. The chorus rolls back around with a mechanistic meter that suits its image of Pamela “dig[ging] a ditch in the desert” as the track draws to a close. A dusty swirl of images refuses to settle into a clear delineation of memories, anticipations, and literary constructs but the blend of indie rock and Latin American rhythm rustles along. Diverting from her familiarly straightforward ballad-rock instincts, Bleach nonetheless affirms her ability to bring literary conceptualism to pop songwriting with apparent effortlessness.