Where the Seams Show

London, the second week of April. There is a thing certain debut albums do – when they arrive late enough for the artist to have grown bored of the version they would have made earlier, and early enough to still be hungry – where the seams are not hidden but offered. Squish, Maddy Haenlein's first long-player under the name Gretel, is that kind of record. The title track opens with a guitar that sounds like it was already playing when the engineer pressed record, the band already inside the song before the song has properly begun, and the whole gesture announces itself less as an arrival than as the resumption of something that had been going on in another room.

It is also, more than the two EPs that preceded it, a record built out of trust. Recorded over five days at RAK Studios with her band and producers Seth Evans and Margo Broom, the album was – by Haenlein's own account – assembled from messy live takes rather than burnished into a more careful version of itself. The seams are the architecture. You can hear, on certain passes, the moment the drummer recommits, the moment the bass swings two beats wide and is caught, the moment a vocal goes a hair too forward in the mix and the room widens to accommodate. None of these are accidents in the way that word usually gets used. They are accidents in the way the better Talk Talk records' accidents are: structural, load-bearing, evidence that the building was actually inhabited while it was being built.

The seams are the architecture.

The opener, 'Squish' proper, is the gesture. 'Fire Blooming Trees' is the elaboration. By 'Maybelline,' the third track, the case for Gretel as a writer has more or less been made – a song about beauty as inheritance, about the way insecurity gets passed down a generational chain, dressed in different clothes each time, the same engine under each new bonnet. Haenlein's vocal moves through the verse the way smoke moves through a screen door, present without being declarative. The chorus, when it arrives, is hookier than the rest of the album's emotional weather has any right to allow.

Worth pausing on the title track itself before going further into the record, since it sets the operating logic for everything around it. Three minutes of fuzzed guitar arriving at speed, the vocal already partway through a thought, the band locking in around her without the usual ceremony of an intro. Heard once, the song does its work. Heard twice, it explains the whole album.

From there into 'Laurali,' and into the looser middle stretch where the record's grunge inheritance is most legible. The reference points are unmistakable: late-period Hole, certain Cat Power records, the way the more melodic strain of nineties American underground rock allowed melancholy and aggression to coexist in the same arrangement without explanation. But Gretel does not borrow these textures so much as metabolise them. By the time the closing minutes of 'Darkness, be my friend' arrive, the song has shed every trace of homage and become only itself. It is the kind of song that does not really finish when the music stops.

I want to flag, before the praise gets embarrassing, the one moment where the record loses its nerve. 'Oh Well,' the ninth track, is the most produced thing on the album – the most willing to polish – and it sits uneasily next to the more open-throated rawness of everything around it. It is not a bad song. It is the song that would have been the obvious single on a more cautious version of this album, and you can hear the gravitational pull it exerted on the project for what was presumably a while. Everything around it is the sound of resisting that pull, and being right to.

The rest holds. 'Witch Hunt' is the record's structural high point, built around a guitar figure that repeats just slightly too often, the way a worry repeats just slightly too often, until you realise the repetition is the point. 'Maybelline,' three tracks earlier, is the record's heart, and the song most likely to outlive everything around it – a piece of writing whose unassuming hook smuggles in one of the more nuanced things anyone has said this year about how femininity gets handed down a chain. Worth slowing down for.

Squish is not a tidy record. That is its argument. Maddy Haenlein has made a debut that audibly trusts its listener to find the architecture inside the mess, and which trusts the band who played it more than it trusts the polish that would have smoothed them away. Spend the patience. Five days in a studio in St John's Wood will repay you for a long time.