Concrete Playground

You may not know the title of her last album, or the words to her latest song. She’s never really been BFFs with the charts and doesn’t have her own reality TV show. But you undoubtedly know her voice — her sultry, haunting, faraway voice. Lilting tenderly through lyric and note, Hope Sandoval sings as if she’s only half woken from a dream, her voice a distant echo from another world.

Best known for her days as the frontwoman of laidback, post-psychedelic band Mazzy Star, who wore the 90s like a fluffy bathrobe — or for her subsequent collaborations with other prolific players of the era like the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and Death in Vegas. But it was her later merging with former My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm O’Siosoig to form Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions that really saw her come into her own as an independent artist.

In 2001, Sandoval released her first solo album Bavarian Fruit Bread, followed by last year's long-awaited Through the Devil Softly, which beautifully combines Sandoval’s hazy, melancholy vocals with delicate, pared-back instrumentation. This year, accompanied by O’Siosoig, the Dirty Three's guitarist Mick Turner and the Laughing Clown's Jeffery Wegener, Sandoval is set to tour Australia, playing single shows in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

Tickets go on sale on Friday, April 30.