On Alessi’s Ark third album The Still Life, the London singer-songwriter strays from her acoustic-based past and lays out 13 revealing tracks. “I write much more from personal experience now,” says a sick Alessi Laurent-Marke from a hotel room in Spain. "I wanted to challenge myself on this record and as far as the songs go I wanted to create a completely different sound stage. I kept quite far away from acoustic guitar which is something I’ve been playing relentlessly since I was 14."

The record's title was Inspired by Tom Robbins' novel Still Life With Woodpecker and like Robbins' own work, has a tongue-and-cheek look at settling down. In the chorus of "Whatever Makes You Happy,"  she advises us to stray away from what makes us lonely "or else," but then invokes some humor with the line, "Hey, big chicken. Who are you kidding?" And on "Pinewood," she threads the internal yearning for the past and the harsh reality of willpower by centering it around a forest. “A still life is a stage in our lives that we are all striving to get at, and I would like very much for this record to bring a bit humor to that stage of life,” she says. “Maybe we can live that life at a young age.”

The Still Life is out April 30 on Yep Roc. Stream it below: