Having taken time out to raise a family, Dot Allison returns with Heart-Shaped Scars, her most realised and illuminating album – and there have been several significant predecessors to compare it to. Allison will always be identified with the band that initially launched her, One Dove, whose Andy Weatherall-produced album Morning Dove White became a downbeat electronic landmark, but her own albums and collaborations amount to a much more significant body of work, with a commanding range across genres and narrative ambition. “The records that I have made were more like a window into my world,” she says. None more so than Heart-Shaped Scars, which gathers many threads of Allison’s broad interests – not just musical but literary, philosophical & her interest in science and nature. Framed by a backdrop of exquisitely sparse and intoxicating dream-folk and Allison’s vocal at its most ethereal, the album is, “obtusely, a concept album,” she reveals. “Love, loss and a universal longing for union that seems to go with the human condition.” Tranquil in sound and passionate in spirit, Heart-Shaped Scars is also Allison’s most personal record yet. Since her debut solo album Afterglow in 1999, Allison has strived to, “keep the listener on a journey – and myself too. I revolt against what I have done before, to evolve and not just occupy the same space.” That journey has taken her from Afterglow’s broad church (trip-hop, Tim Buckley-esque ballads, dance tracks, chilled psychedelia) to the sultry synth-pop of We Are Science (2002), the lush, baroque Exaltation Of Larks (2007) and the eclectic, rootsy drama of Room 7½ (2009).