Newcastle indie-folk singer-songwriter Ruth Lyon releases her new single ‘Perfect’. Released alongside a new video directed by Sel Maclean, ‘Perfect’ is the latest compelling glimpse of Lyon’s forthcoming debut album Poems & Non-Fiction – out June 13 on Pink Lane Records. The track follows earlier singles ‘Books’ and ‘Wickerman’.

Produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding), Poems & Non-Fiction draws on influences from Adrienne Lenker, Fiona Apple, and Moondog, combining analogue textures and angular indie-folk sensibilities. Lyon’s songwriting gives as much weight to silence as to sound, with poetic nuance and muscular understatement. Her voice floats between the abstract, the archetypal, and raw vulnerability, inviting the listener to both reach out and dig deep.

New single ‘Perfect’ is the album’s most pop-adjacent moment: a sharp indie-pop that critiques the cult of curated living. The sardonic hook: “Isn’t it all so perfect / Sundays were made for worship”, sits uneasily against Lyon’s deadpan admission: “my skin is crawling / I want to shout.” As the production closes in during the middle eight, her voice sounds buried beneath the surface: “I can’t leave.”

On the release of ‘Perfect’, Ruth said: “It’s about how modern life traps us in a toxic pursuit of perfection – we’re all celebrities of our own life, worshipping at the altar of our egos. It’s kind of infected us all, I think. The perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect health and a perfect body flaunting perfect hair/skin/tits/bum blah blah blah.”