Alas I Cannot Swim by Laura Marling

Alas, I Cannot Swim, Laura Marling's debut album, first appeared on 4 February 2008, three days after she turned 18, packaged as a "songbox" with the CD, a code for free concert tickets and a keepsake for every song, before a regular release on Virgin a week later. Charlie Fink, who fronted her previous band Noah and the Whale, produced it at Eastcote Studios, a small independent room in west London that Marling praised for its honest, organic feel.

That's just how it sounds: spare, unvarnished folk, acoustic and hushed, with a voice far steadier than her years turning over love, loss and the tangles in between with an old soul's calm. "Ghosts" is the one that slipped onto the countdowns. The Mercury Music Prize nominated it that same year, and I Speak Because I Can came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.