Kylie’s new album Tension finds the singer in a feelgood mood before Vegas residency

The Australian’s 16th album, Tension, continues the purple patch that was startlingly clear on her last album, 2020’s Disco. From the off — Padam Padam opens the album — this is superlative electro-pop fare that plays to Minogue’s strengths. The songs, which fuse the best of EDM, 80s synths and 90s house, are cleverly and painstakingly assembled and designed to enjoy cross-generational appeal.

There’s a huge cast of songwriters and producers here — as has become the norm on Kylie albums — but Tension has a cohesion that previous efforts have sorely lacked.

The title is misnomer. This is a relaxed Kylie, very much in feelgood mood. One More Time, a razor-sharp dancefloor confection, is surely bound for Padam Padam’s club ubiquity while Hands is a sultry R&B number that references Barbie but wasn’t included on Mark Ronson’s star-studded movie soundtrack album. The former is a Minogue song in the classic vein; the latter doesn’t sound much like her at all but, once heard, it’s hard to forget such is its earworm capabilities.

As is so often the case with this artist, some of the material should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Sin City may be celebrated on a purely surface level, but Vegas High is vacuous fluff. It was presumably penned with all those Nevada shows in mind, but it would be best kept off the set-list.

You Still Get Me High, on the other hand, is the sort of wildly catchy, effervescent pop song that keeps Minogue up to speed with the likes of Taylor Swift. She may be 55, but listen to this giddy aural confection and you’d never know it.

In 1987, the same year that Kylie Minogue — then best known as Charlene in Neighbours — was releasing her debut single, a bunch of like-minded musicians were forming a band in Dublin. The Harvest Ministers, led by the bookish Will Merriman, delivered some exceptional music, but those all-important breaks never quite happened.

Now, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the release of their debut album, Little Dark Mansion, comes a specially remastered vinyl edition.

Listening to the album again, it’s a mystery why such smartly penned and exquisitely arranged songs didn’t make stars of the band. They’re far from the only ones to suffer such a fate. Future Setanta labelmates Brian also charmed the critics, but were largely ignored by the music-buying public.

Little Dark Mansion remains a delight. Three decades on and songs like Railroaded sound as magnificently bruised as ever. A piano-led heartbreaker is sung beautifully by Merriman and its string-laden coda is sublime.

How is it that a song as fine as this remains unknown to most? Copies of the album are available on the band’s Bandcamp page.