Anna Meredith

After hearing the enormous brassy surge of ‘Nautilus’, the exhilarating opening track of Anna Meredith’s debut album Varmints, it comes as a surprise how the South-London-based composer describes her main source of musical inspiration.

Not dramatic mountain landscapes obscured by rolling clouds, not rocket fuel and space exploration, not cataclysmic weather events, but, “really tiny things.”“I’d rather write a piece about paperclips than love,” she says. “It would make me feel horrified to be asked to write a symphony about war.

I’d rather take something small and write out from it than take something massive and try and contain it.” As a result of this creative expansion, Varmintsis a kind of imaginative Big Bang, a record bursting at the seams – with ideas, with intrigue, with emotion.