Too often, people hyperbolize, misusing the phrase “mature beyond their years”. But Laura Marling is what that idiom, distilled, sounds like: at 18, she released Alas I Cannot Swim, 12 pitch-perfect songs of true love lost. Now, wizened (relatively speaking) at 21, her third album A Creature I Don’t Know finds a more assertive voice singing triumphant shanties while confidently making a guitar’s spare brackets all her own. If you’re not listening to Laura Marling, you’re doing yourself a disservice. She—this generation’s Leonard Cohen—is among the few who writes songs that make your heart break and sing at the same time. (And that’s no hyperbole.)
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2011.