Just shy of nine months after releasing her third album, ‘Glow’, Alice Phoebe Lou has shared a surprise follow-up titled ‘Child’s Play’.

Lou minted the record in ten days with drummer/keyboardist Ziv Yamin and bassist Dekel Adin. It also saw her link back up with producer David Parry, who’d also worked closely with Lou on ‘Glow’. Once more, she and her collaborators holed up at Parry’s Vancouver-based studio Dobro Genius, where they embraced a steadfast work ethic and old-school equipment to craft a defiantly unique record.

“The process was simple and intuitive,” Lou said in a statement, “using an eight-track tape machine and allowing the very new songs to grow into themselves. We worked tirelessly on a limited schedule to bring these personal songs to life, so used to each other by now from recording ‘Glow’ together that even though the workload was immense, it felt easy and enjoyable, the four of us very much on the same page.”

As was the case with her first three albums, Lou released ‘Child’s Play’ independently, sharing it sans announcement on Friday (December 3). The drop came as a shock to fans not just for its lack of any teasers, but for how quickly it followed ‘Glow’ – that album only landed back in March, with its predecessor, ‘Paper Castles’, coming two years prior in 2019.

Have a listen to ‘Child’s Play’ below, then check out the cover art and tracklisting:

1. Underworld
2. Sweet
3. Silly
4. Me & The Moon
5. Let Me
6. If You Were Here
7. Care
8. Shake
9. End of the Road
10. Child’s Play

Last December, the South African artist shared her interpretation of a then-unreleased Paul McCartney track, ‘Deep Deep Feeling’. It came in the lead-up to ‘McCartney III’, as part of a campaign that saw a suite of selected artists from around the world interpret tracks from the record before they were officially released.