The leaves are falling, the clocks have gone back, and autumn is certainly here meaning it’s the time of year I re-enter my Laura Marling phase. This year, she’s released a new album to soundtrack the darker evenings.

This is her first release since Song For Our Daughter at the start of lockdown in 2020. That title was inspired by Maya Angelou’s Letter to My Daughter, but Marling has said it now seems a premonition as she has since had a daughter of her own. On her 8th studio album, Patterns in Repeat, she reflects on motherhood. A background of domestic conversation and the babble of a baby set the album up perfectly for the scene depicted in the opening lines: “You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen / Life is slowing down, but it’s still bitchin’”.

The new album is relatively short at 36 minutes; its perfect simplicity is summed up by the track ‘No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can’. Here, elegant piano accentuates Marling’s soft vibratos and the beautifully poetic lyricism that she has been appraised for since her first album (Alas I Cannot Swim, recorded when she was just 17) and seems to have only got better at since.

“It feels like she’s lulling a child to sleep on this album”

It feels like she’s lulling a child to sleep on this album – there’s no percussion on any of the tracks. The swelling strings on ‘Child of Mine’ are used in many songs on the album but come to the fore on ‘The Shadows’ to great effect, seemingly in conversation with the hum of vocal harmonies on the track. Of course, the guitar accompaniments she is so well-known for string through this album, as expected from the first hint we got from the record in the form of the single ‘Patterns’, featuring just her vocals and her guitar.

The Dylan-esque ‘Caroline’ follows another Marling tradition of titling songs with women’s names (‘Sophia’, ‘Daisy’, ‘Nouel’, ‘Alexandra’). Femininity itself has always been a strong thread across her records, like Semper Femina (words that she also carries as a tattoo) which comes from a longer Latin Virgil phrase and means “always a woman”. She has not only discussed these themes in her songs, but also on her podcast Reversal of the Muse. Here she spoke to women (like producer Catherine Marks and country legend Dolly Parton) about their experiences working in the music industry. One of the topics that arose across this series was about how having children can affect one’s career. With Patterns in Repeat, Marling successfully achieves her “hope that if nothing else this album serves to represent the possibility that the pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art”. And it’s safe to say that the successes of the album don’t just stop there.

“The pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art”

I can’t help but to draw a comparison with Lucy Rose’s album, This Ain’t the Way You Go Out, released earlier this year, which also reflected on the experience of becoming a mother. Perhaps it’s unhelpful to compare the music of women with newborn babies at the risk of compartmentalising or categorising them, but I think this is also proof that the discussions Marling was having on her podcast are causing the industry to move forward. They are both manifestations of her personal hopes for Patterns in Repeat.

Marling not only looks to her relationship with motherhood and her daughter on this album, but to the generation above as she covers ‘Looking Back’ – a song written by her father, Charlie Marling. Such reflection makes us fear she may be stepping back from her career, as she mentioned in a Guardian article earlier this year. Her limited live shows also suggest a “slowing down” that she sang about at the start of the album. Nearing the end of the album, the lyric “I want you to know I gave it up willingly” makes us question whether this is directed to her child, or possibly her audience. In fact, it feels like this album was actually not made for us at all, but for her daughter. Especially on ‘Lullaby’, it feels like we are overhearing or intruding on a deeply personal and intimate relationship.

Above all, Marling is dwelling on the cyclical nature of life throughout this record. The final song ‘Patterns in Repeat’ not only circles back to the second song ‘Patterns’ and the title of the album, but directly references the riff of ‘Breathe’, part of the four-song ‘Suite’ that opened Once I was an Eagle back in 2013. The line “that everlasting tune you had to sing” stands out – there’s a definite timelessness about this album.