Adia Victoria, based in Nashville, has been insistent that the music she makes is the blues: not Americana, or indie rock, or any of the other styles that she might be pigeonholed into. It’s not blues in the sense of adopting the 12-bar shuffle, more that it draws on the themes that have affected her as a woman of colour in the south: race, religion (she was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church), powerlessness and oppression. Silences, her second album, traces those ideas through the story of one woman experiencing them, though – as with most themed albums – you wouldn’t necessarily know that unless you’d been told.

What is apparent, though, is the way Victoria twists the themes of the blues into new shapes, asserting her protagonist’s need for agency, a need that extends beyond earthly confines: “First of all / There is no God / Because I killed my God,” she sings on the opener, Clean. “I killed him clean / So it did not hurt.” By Dope Queen Blues, she’s found divinity within herself: “I had a thought: I am a god / Of this I am convinced.” Her musical settings have evolved since her early singles and debut album, Beyond the Bloodhounds. Silences adds horns, woodwind and electronics to a guitar-band set-up, and Victoria and co-producer Aaron Dessner twist it all appealingly. They set her calm voice against backings that suggest turmoil without ever over-egging things, from the slinky rock’n’roll of Different Kind of Love to the spectral balladry of the closer, Get Lonely. It’s all a bit wonderful, actually.