Start with the title. ‘Harperfield’ is a reference to the first house Emma Pollock’s parents bought, as a young married couple, some years before her birth. She remembers it as an idyllic place surrounded by nature, golden light and space, but admits that her memories are hazily patched together from early childhood recollection and family lore, always slightly out of reach. Then the cover – an image of Guy Pollock, again in the days before his daughter’s birth, working his beloved land near Blair Atholl. These clues suggest an intensely personal album, rooted in specific relationships, and Pollock acknowledges that the death of her mother and illness of her father, and an attempt to understand their lives as individuals, not simply parents, underscores In Search of Harperfield.

There is something much more complex than autobiography happening here, though. Yes, Guy and Kathleen Pollock are possibly always there in the background, and most explicitly on central track ‘Intermission’, which details an adult child’s panic and exhaustion as ‘the man I know best’ and ‘the woman who made me’ become dependent and infirm; ‘this grip that digs in is dictated by kin’. However, it’s perhaps more useful to see that search for the truth of a person or a time as an embarkation point for a journey, exploring and examining life.

Throughout the album there’s a sense of Pollock, as an adult a confirmed city-dweller, circling back to those places that she lived in as a child and that her parents lived in before her; the huge skies and wild expanses in Galloway around her childhood home of Castle Douglas. This yearning for wide open space finds beautiful expression in the swelling, soaring instrumentations throughout the album – Malcolm Lindsay and Pollock’s husband Paul Savage creating arrangements that couldn’t possibly be contained in the concrete box of a city, that need to expand outwards.

The sheer range of musical styles encompassed here have been chosen to express that thematic complexity in texture and mood, too: tender, troubled harmonies building to a ferocious rage against the patriarchal machinations of Irish gender politics in ‘Cannot Keep A Secret’, or the full-bodied orchestration and contemplative scope of ‘Dark Skies’, as its lyrics take in the mysteries and practicalities of the universe and tilt a shift at the idea of faith. Woven throughout are a number of clever callbacks, strengthening connections between the songs: for instance, the rowdy, swaggering girl-gang call and response on teenage-bullies-in-the-park romp ‘Parks and Recreation’ matures into a thoughtful echo on ‘In the Company of the Damned’, in which an older, ghostly voice offers advice to her younger self. There are ghosts everywhere, not just on the closing track – In Search of Harperfield is haunted by pasts and possibilities, by long-held secrets burst open.

It’s a very adult album, too – no time wasted on the pop singer’s adolescent, saccharine fantasies of romantic love. The myriad narrators – despite the intensely personal nature of some of the songs, there are a wealth of different voices here – are reaching to comprehend huge ideas, and are all certain of their own minds. The honeyed liquid clarity of Pollock’s voice, melting between notes, and the soaring, chamber-pop orchestration on the grander tracks belie a darkness at the heart of this album; a world-weary impatience with the excesses and excuses of human nature permeating ‘Alabaster’ and ‘Old Ghosts’, exhausted anger at the world on tracks like ‘Intermission’, or ‘Clemency’, an experimentation in character fired up with Old Testament fury. There’s wit too: Pollock has a lot of fun with cheeky percussion, driving rock guitar and sarcastic lyricism on ‘Vacant Stare’. All of human life may not quite be here, but the whole album is shot through with understanding of the complicated nature of humans, and of life. In Search of Harperfield, though it contains many fictions, is an album glowing with truth.