The Cryptic in the Plainspoken

IT’S A woman’s world on Laura Marling’s sixth album, Semper Femina, her latest set of cozy, folky melodies carrying profoundly enigmatic tidings. The characters in her new songs are women; men, except for someone’s mean father, are absent, simply irrelevant to her current intentions.

Ms. Marling has also been busy with “Reversal of the Muse: An Exploration of Femininity in Creativity,” a podcast series of conversations with female musicians, producers, engineers and executives. But her backup musicians and technicians on Semper Femina are men: most prominently, the album’s producer, Blake Mills, the guitarist who has lately worked with Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple and John Legend.

Ms. Marling is a subtly virtuosic guitarist with a voice that’s pensive, consoling, poised and wise beyond her years. (She’s 27.) Over her past five superb albums, she has written delicate and stormy parables about romance, wanderlust, art and self-realization, invoking myth and archetype as much as confessionalism. Her music is rooted in, among other things, English folk tradition and the acousticelectric mesh of Southern California folk-pop from the late 1960s and early 1970s; she moved from England to Los Angeles in 2013.

The songs on Semper Femina use deceptively plain-spoken vocabulary to conjure sometimes cryptic relationships and events. The album title echoes a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: Varium et mutabile semper femina: “Fickle and changeable always is woman.” (Ms. Marling quotes the entire line, half in English, in a song called Nouel, addressed to a singer who “speaks a word, and it gently turns/to perfect metaphor.”)

“I started out writing Semper Femina as if a man was writing about a woman,” she told the magazine Fader by email. “And then I thought it’s not a man, it’s me — I don’t need to pretend it’s a man to justify the intimacy of the way I’m looking and feeling about women.”

Those feelings are tangled. They involve lost loves and lessons learned, connections and separations, hopes and shortcomings, memories and what-ifs. Her narrators can be calm observers or central characters with elusive back stories.

“I might be someone’s daughter/i might be somewhat odd/but I was wild once,” Ms. Marling sings in “Wild Once,” adding, “And I can’t forget it.” In “Next Time,” it gradually emerges that the singer abandoned someone —“I feel her/i hear her weakly scream ”—and remains burdened by conscience: “I don’t want to be the kind/struck by fear to run and hide.” Literary conceits melt in the intimacy of the music. Ms. Marling’s voice and acoustic guitar, and melodies that sound as if they had always existed, remain at the core of most songs.

Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Cleareyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity. NYT THE MOST telling moment on the debut album by the young soul singer Khalid, American Teen, comes at the end of the title track, which opens the album. The song begins with a beeping alarm and new-wave drum-machine slaps, then veers into a story