All songs on Lato are original compositions and sung in Paula’s native Finnish, while some of the lyrics are borrowed from traditional Finnish folklore and poetry. Her vocals and fingerpicking style of ukulele playing has been complemented tastefully by the addition of several Kraków-based musicians: Adam Partyka on percussion, Michał Bigulak on bass and Kacper Chmura on guitar. The added instrumentation comes as a departure from her raw and stripped-down live sets. I talked to her recently about how it all came about and what it was like collaborating with other musicians on her own material. “It was amazing. Bliss. It was my first experience of someone else taking my songs and doing something with them. The guys came prepared with wonderful ideas that added to the songs in ways I could never have come up with,” she beams. Far from the stress and time constraints which she expected from the recording process, she was totally taken aback at the chilled vibe that everyone exuded and delighted to see her precious songs evolve from their original minimal form.

The opening song, Aamul’ varhain, is upbeat, the tempo driven by the thump of the bass drum which hints at the jubilation to come, while the fine violin work from Paolo Cavalaglio rounds things off. The first single off the album, Tuuvittelen tuttuain, is translated as “I cradle my dearest.” The first verse is basically four different alliterated refrains of saying “I’m lulling my baby to sleep.” Paula’s recognisable fingerpicking style and the hi-hat’s chime rock us gently into the heart of the song, swaddling the listener in warmth and a familiar maternal embrace, while Łukasz Pietrzak‘s chugging steam engine harmonica comes rolling by to snap us out of our hypnosis and along a dusty train track that stretches way out west.

One of my favourite songs on the album is the haunting and ethereal Etsi itsellesi toinen. Here the interplay between the chiding voice, disconcerting backing vocals and ukulele creates an air of approaching menace and dread. It is an incantation to keep away those who mean us harm, a Finnish cauldron bubbling over with lacerating lyrics to exorcise evil, a musical spell cast to ward off malevolence. Paula states matter-of-factly that the song was indeed born from personal experience. “Well, I was in a situation where I wished I could make someone lose interest in me, and the song was an expression of that wish.”

When the album’s darker edgier elements surface, it is spellbinding, the darkness occasionally accentuated by the joyful outpourings from other tracks, often jarringly different but somehow heightening the other’s mood. Paula’s ageless voice is showcased on several majestic songs, including the gentle drone lullaby melody of Idan laulu. The bucolic atmosphere conjured here is utterly enchanting and harks back nostalgically to the Finnish idyll of nature and the bonds of family – past, present and future – that bind us; like the entangled roots of trees underneath a vast forest, our interconnectedness is inescapable. Paula explains, “This song is for my niece, Ida. I wrote it when we were at a summer cottage in Finland during a heat wave. She was a baby then. ‘Grow slowly like a pine tree. The forest lets the sapling grow. The glow of this summer will last through all the years. These trees, long standing. Bygone generations live within us.’” Curiously, the magnificent primeval forest near where I live in Kraków also has Paula’s surname: Las Wolski.

On jo myöhä is quite simply gorgeous, one lover’s ode to another, where she pleads with him to come home, “it’s getting late, the wind is soft but a chill is coming, come here, come home where it’s warm.” Full credit to the musicians who collaborated on Lato for they are rarely overbearing, always subtle and skilfully understated. Their deft touches – at times the lack of touch altogether – transform these delicate fragile compositions. The beguiling concluding number on Lato, Alijai sorja, has Paula’s voice and ukulele playing set to the plaintive cry of a traditional Finnish folktale. It is heart-wrenching, the multitracked vocals and reverby chorus-effect merely adding to that otherworldly sense of loss and longing. The protagonist explains how much she misses her blue-eyed beloved, telling us that she might even die of longing if he ever forgot about her. You cannot help but believe those words.

There is the dark and light of both winter and summer on Lato, but I would love to see shades of autumn and spring too. I feel there is room for Paula to explore more intricate moods, complex melodies, sounds, different instrumentation – even lyrics in English to broaden the general appeal, if that is something she is even interested in. I sometimes think of her duetting with an equally talented male counterpart in the style of the 2001 album, Time (The Revelator), by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, or channelling her inner Sinead O’Connor circa I do not want what I haven’t got. Irrespective of my reference points, one thing remains true, Paula is very much her own musician.  This album has undoubtedly fused her rich eclectic influences into a distinctive style – at times starkly melancholic, often buoyantly life-affirming – replete with mature bittersweet songs of love and loss.

Lato is available to purchase in digital form here, and to stream on Spotify. You can buy a physical copy of the album here.