Her Handwriting by Trembling Blue Stars

Her Handwriting, the 1996 debut from Trembling Blue Stars, is a break-up record in the most literal sense. Bobby Wratten wrote it about the end of his relationship with Anne Mari Davies, who had stood beside him in the Field Mice and Northern Picture Library, and it plays as one hushed, intimate song cycle. Wratten had actually binned his first batch of break-up songs in early 1995 as too messy; it took engineer and musician Ian Catt to talk him into recording, at Catt's studio in Mitcham, South London, across that autumn and winter.

What came out mixes indie pop with electronics: dreamy, glimmering guitars drifting through ambient haze, and Wratten's voice pitched barely above a confession. "Abba on the Jukebox" went out as a single ahead of the album, which arrived in May as the first LP on Shinkansen Recordings, took its title from a Go-Betweens lyric, and landed on Melody Maker's list of the year's best.

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