Sometimes, the most beautiful and precious things can be discovered lurking in the shadows: a new favourite bar, owls, cats, psilocybin mushrooms, and intimate drives with loved ones in the moonlight. So it is with one of the year’s most gorgeous albums. Anti-folk Dublin musician Hilary Woods has been making enchanting solo music for over two decades now, and yet she still manages to startle: this is just something incredibly special. Call it a late flowering in the dark, if you like.

Opener ‘Voice’ sets out its stall early: crepuscular caresses of soft drums, a violin which miaows, and a backdrop of drones. There’s a Lynchian stillness which envelops you in its unsettling calm, tight and sleekly rippling as a boa constrictor. Then a choir join ins, but far from reassuring, saccharine voices, there’s an added layer of disturbing enablers in Woods’ gameplan. They pop up again on the metronomic, minimalist ‘Taper’, begging you to join in the strange rituals of hauntology.

Woods’ voice remains as lovely as ever, never rising above anything less than a shivery half-whisper, which is incredibly seductive, but also ambivalent. From this low, slow register, you are beckoned into her nocturnal habitat, and the funereal pace never quickens. ‘Endgames’ contains a string section that’s both twinkling and malevolent. It’s one of the year’s finest albums: uncanny, beautiful, and exquisitely crafted; and best of all, it’s released just in time for Samhain.