Dora Jar - No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire

There’s a decently sized argument for Dora Jar’s standout skill being her ability to shape-shift, and between the Phoebe Bridgers-like straightforward title track and the gloriously kitsch ‘Smoke Out The Window’ – a pop number that makes like a novelty 1990s dance track in its hyperactivity and places Dora’s own sugary vocal adjacent to hyperpop’s proclivity for pitch-shifting – there’s enough here to show that’s true. See also ‘Ragdoll’, which drips with a similar throwback electronic slant to that which made PinkPantheress her name, and ‘Puppet’, bristling with Sparks-like oddities, her vocal at once coquettish and demonic.

But under the bells and whistles – and what curious bells and whistles they are, with 2010s lo-fi guitar wobbles, scattershot drum’n’bass beats and piercing operatic vocal stabs among them – at the core of ‘No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire’ stands some really excellent songwriting. The same production quirks that transform ‘Cannonball’ from singer-songwriter also ran are used skilfully to hazily mask what otherwise could be unashamed bangers: opener ‘This Is Why’ might, in another life, soundtrack pints-in-the-air festival euphoria, while the playground rhyme cadence of ‘Timelapse’ has every bit the viral potential, and ‘She Loves Me’ could, in other hands, be a noughties indie-pop ad-friendly track, with its peppy bassline and elongated “eeee” of its chorus. If this sounds confusing, then perhaps that’s the point: here, Dora Jar has one foot in singer-songwriter world and the other in pure pop and it makes for a more interesting listen than a first glance might allow for.