Inni-K gently handles loss, space and renewal on Still A Day

The album's worth listening to with good speakers or headphones. Seán Mac Erlaine's impeccable production maps where each instrument is playing. And the sound is richly orchestral – from fiddle-scrapes to the salient synth. The whole thing's more about vibes than narrative or meaning: contradictory, ambivalent, fleeting, at times too intricate for words.

"Goldfinch" is a startling opener that meanders Bjork-like, into vocal strands that layer; then a traditional-sounding song emerges, almost as though by accident. Matthew Jacobson’s percussion (not dissimilar to Brian Walsh's playing on earlier albums) shadows the voice with delicate aplomb. The song then condenses into her light, quietly playful voice. After so much silence and confusion, she begins to sing the world into being.

"In the Beat" parallels a mellow vocal with echoey electric drums. A dreamy voice circles mantra-like: “in the beat [...] in the beat". The song explores the silence at the heart of sound, or perhaps the stillness at the heart of movement. Her near-whispered, meditative voice evokes the vocal intimacy of Imogen Heap, or Laurie Anderson. It all feels quite art-house, or like she's invoking something spiritual and very personal.

Groove-based "Beatha" is reminiscent of Portico Quartet, The Bad Plus, or even Radiohead's Hail to the Thief at its most hypnotic. Her fiddle scratches and rattles with impressive precision, while the twisting, layered harmonies feel very Joan as Policewoman. Apparently the song was born of a veg-growing course and her personal ideas about self-sufficiency. In the video she's lying in a forest next to a river. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to throw away your worldly possessions and dance around a fire. Along with her voice, her fiddle-playing flits and quivers with strident, impressionistic stokes.

"Heuston Station" pares back her voice and guitar: a Mitchell-esque song that traces the solitude of a Sunday concourse. "Once the Eyes Adjust" feels like waking up, with gentle drones and repetitious harmonies. "Letting in Dreams" is jazzier, with Feist-like, sprightly vocals and edgy percussion.

The title track is the record's still point, and the pick of the bunch. Once more there is so much space to draw from. In Joni Mitchell-guise, she poetically muses: "Across dark waters three crows fly". The track is eerie, premonitory, the eye of the storm that hovers under everything else. We are deeply moved without quite realising why – at the cusp of some deep sadness.

"Peppersome" closes the record with a final nod to tradition. Another fiddle solo holds the opening, before her wordless voice joins, following rather than leading. This is another meditation on sound in the wake of loss – a free dialogue between voice and instrument. Slowly the voice recedes, leaving the fiddle to fade. It feels like a folk gesture, but loosened, deconstructed.

Still a Day is folk, certainly, but also ambient, jazz, art-song – a tactile, deeply sensitive album at the threshold of meaning and sound. Throughout, she's willing to let the pieces unfurl by their own means, to trust that texture will suffice. Out of rupture, she's made something luminous; it is an album to unsettle, console, and finally, affirm.