LUMP - a collaboration between London singer-songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay of the band Tunng - return with their second album, Animal, the pair's first new music since the release of their acclaimed eponymous debut in 2018.

Half cute, half dark and creepy, the songs Marling and Lindsay create as LUMP are unlike anything from either of their respective other projects. Marling's lyrics are spontaneous, immediate and playful (she drew heavily on her interest in psychoanalysis). Meanwhile, Lindsay creates an accessible electronic palette that borders on psychedelic. Animal was recorded at Lindsay's home studio in Margate, Kent, and primarily constructed around his Eventide H949 Harmonizer, the same pitch-shifter David Bowie used on Low.

As with the first album, Marling would arrive in the studio without having heard any of Lindsay's music, with the hope that it would bring the lyrics an immediacy and a spontaneity. There were other sources of inspiration for Marling aside from psychoanalysis: half-memories, family stories, strange dreams; things she had read, or been told or imagined. "LUMP is so the repository for so many things that l've had in my mind and just don't fit anywhere in that way," she explained. "They don't have to totally make narrative sense, but weirdly they end up making narrative sense in some way."