The multi-instrumentalist won the Welsh Music Prize for her Week Of Pines LP in 2013 - Fossil Scale has the tough job of following that up, but going by the quality of "The Doldrums", there won't be any issues.

Speaking about "The Doldrums", Ruth says: "'The Doldrums' was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. I'd just moved to Caernarfon, and had become totally transfixed by the view out over the Menai Straits (a narrow stretch of tidal water about 16 miles long that separates mainland Gwynedd from Anglesey). It was absolutely beautiful. But there was something that felt ominous, something to do with the stillness of the water. And this sort of chimed with how I'd been feeling; the sometimes disconcerting stillness of being happy! According to people who sail, the doldrums are a sea-state of mild inactivity, stagnation. It's caused by low pressure and heating at the equator. My dad was in the merchant navy as a young man, and he confirmed that the looming threat of those parts of the Pacific sea are really unnerving. Coleridge has this amazing description of them in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner: 'Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion; as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.'" 

This new LP sees Ruth move from harp to piano as her primary "writing tool", and record in London and Manic Street Preachers' Cardiff studio, Faster. It's co-produced with Marta Salogni (Phil Selway, Eliot Sumner) and David Wrench (Caribou, Bat For Lashes).

Fossil Scale is out via Navigator on 7 October. Live dates are coming soon.

Check out the new single below.