Given the circumstances we find ourselves under, it is welcome to receive an album that rewards repeated listening. Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters presents the volatile American singer-songwriter at her most raw and strange. Recorded over several years at her home in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, its unwieldy yet deeply felt songs defy conventional forms and arrangements.

Apple’s multi-tracked vocals unfold with an air of almost childish melodic extemporisation over percussive rhythms tracks made with household objects (including rubber bands, empty oil cans and baked seedpods). The album has a solipsistic and provocatively amateurish quality, but stick with it, because there is real depth of feeling, wit and thought on display that grows richer the deeper you dig.

With her 1996 debut album Tidal, Apple arrived as a teenage prodigy, a sensitive piano-based songwriter channeling the emotional spirit of grunge. Outspoken and determined to cleave a revelatory, autobiographical path through music, she might be viewed as a precursor to today’s goth pop sensation, Billie Eilish, but Apple has also been characterised (or, perhaps, demonised) as a high-strung eccentric in the vein of Sinead O’Connor.

She has talked candidly about the impact on her mental health of being raped by a stranger at the age of 12, and her songs negotiate dark areas between victim and survivor, grappling with depression and compulsion, and driven by urgent truth-telling. She is not prolific and has struggled with the attention of fame and rigours of touring. This is only her fifth album in 24 years, and her first since 2012. But, at 42-years-old, it reveals her, once again, to be one of the finest songwriters and boldest voices of her generation.