The Signal, the Canadian singer-songwriter Elizabeth Shepherd’s latest album, won’t come out now until late-January 2015 in the UK/Ireland.

Sometimes compared to Esperanza Spalding and Gretchen Parlato The Signal’s sample-based title track (featuring an extract of the voice of CBC radio programme The Signal’s Laurie Brown) is an evocative duet with Alex Samaras based around the premiss of a dreamy “don't you love those stories about people who arrange to meet in five years time somewhere, just meet and then decide what happens?”

Guitarist Lionel Loueke, whose last album was Heritage back in 2012, features on the tracks ‘Willow’, Shepherd inspired in her lyrics by a book about historical feminine archetypes, and the bass-led ‘This.’

Shepherd, who also plays Rhodes electric piano on all tracks, has incorporated a spoken word sample of Leadbelly (on protest song ‘B.T. Cotton’), and folds in hip-hop flavours on the highly atmospheric ‘Lion’s Den’ among other elements of her highly inventive and original approach. 

Elizabeth Shepherd, above