Marietta invokes unnatural sounds to cut through the anxiety.

It is also a return in another sense: to his youth, taking its influences from the alt-rock bands of the nineties: Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction. But the relative hopefulness and innocence of that era has not escaped the shift into 2020 unscathed (how could it?). Marietta has always blended an ear for melody, albeit an off-kilter one, with an inclination towards the noisy and unsettling, and often these songs sound like they are being ripped apart from the inside. This is pop music on a bad trip.

As a guitarist, Marietta is a virtuoso of the knob-twiddling sort: no long winding solos here but a knack for dragging strange new sounds out of the instrument. His list of references includes John Frusciante and David Pajo, the Slint guitarist whose solo project Papa M is a favourite of Marietta's, and who gets a lush layered instrumental track named for him towards the album's close (a palette cleanser after the in-your-face aggression of "The Jordan's Rules"), and he has inherited their sense of mood and intense concentration.

Marietta describes Prazepam St. as "a chemical album", and the drug in the title - prescribed for anxiety - is just one ingredient in an unsavoury cocktail that runs through the album: "Ether OK"; the brilliant "Dmpa" that takes its name from a drug used, amongst other things, to treat sex offenders in the States; and the woozy, wonderful "Ellie Jane", who I'm going to assume is some not-so-distant cousin of the much-admired Mary. Prazepam St. may not be an album in its right mind, but it is all the better for that.

Find Prazepam St. on bandcamp.