Watch: Salvia Plath – House of Leaves

We haven’t laid eyes on Baltimore musician Michael Collins since he dropped the blissful hypno-pop Dreams cassette under his Run DMT alias back in 2011. The shape-shifting affable oddball has now returned under a new – and faintly obnoxious – moniker, Salvia Plath with an album pencilled in for 8 July via Domino imprint Weird World.

The first cut from The Bardo Story entitled ’House Of Leaves’ opens with frantically strummed acoustic guitar and rattling drum beats; the tempo easing gradually with the introduction of gently lilting organ and Collins’ hazy drawl. It’s a far cry from the frat-boy brattiness you’d half- expect given the amalgam Salvia Plath comprises notoriously potent legal weed and troubled poet. Instead we’re gifted a warm dollop of pastoral underground pop, lashed with a wavy psych-folk splatter; the product of just the right number of blunt tokes we reckon.