There’s a plethora of newer artists enamoured with and luxuriating in the nostalgia of similarly fuzzed-out sounds, bringing their own moody interpretations to huge audiences – take Ethel Cain or Minneapolis band she’s green, for instance – and that passion for the music is clearly in Harris too, aided here by bassist Scott Simmons and drummer Jed Bindeman.

Going beyond the realms of her better-known Grouper project, is an excursion into hazy territory where dream-pop, shoegaze, and fuzzy indie-rock overlap, and, in that sense, it’s full of promise. But the results tend to meander rather aimlessly instead of hooking the listener and enveloping us in Helen's own world. Too often the songs start brightly, even relatively bouncy, but peter out in a whimper. It’s like watching a wind-up toy slowly gearing down as the kinetic energy needed to perform ticks to a stop.

Of course the tracks are replete with the requisite distorted guitars, submerged vocals, and a deliberately blurred sense of space, but, on a few songs, Harris’s voice is pushed more to the fore, becoming a more crucial part of the mix. Soft enough to become part of the instrumentation, but melodic enough to prevent the haze becoming too shapeless, the vocals on these songs evoke a sense of timelessness rather than something more referential, as it were.

Still, ideas like the album opener “Faraway” or the otherwise sublime “Starline” feel like sketches that are slight and cut short. And where tracks are longer, they’re sometimes padded out unnecessarily – a particularly stark feature of album closer “Canyon”.

In some sense, the more drawn-out songs lean closer to the intimate droning and lo-fi recordings of Grouper than they do as standalone entities, and nowhere is this clearer than on the consecutive “Dead shark” and “Dead shark II”.

The first is an introspective acoustic outing that feels close and confessional; the second, reworked with the band, is more purposeful, with sweet guitar lines revealing the pop instincts underneath Helen’s shoegaze surface. It’s arguably the more satisfying of the two songs until it’s thrown to the winds and scattered, rather unedifyingly, into the ether. “black and quiet love" and “Stay with me” both drift by unremarkably, underlining the album’s strange regard for sequencing.

The centrepiece of the album, literally, is “darkblue”, a six-minute burner built around elemental imagery and atmosphere that sounds grand and expansive without relying on ambiguous gestures. Overall though, what's missing is a genuine sense of surprise.

sounds intimate and carefully made, albeit with odd shifts in pacing. But, with the band having actually lived through each iteration of dream-pop and shoegaze, there's a sense that Helen are largely just revisiting sounds through a cloud of memories. That’s hardly a crime, but when it feels like flicking through a well-worn deck of reference points, however pleasant, it’s more comforting than essential.