Laura Marling debuts four new tracks at Los Angeles show as Alex Turner watches on

The singer's fifth album is currently slated for a March release

Laura Marling debuted four unheard tracks last night (December 4) at a club in Los Angeles.

The material was taken from her upcoming fifth album, currently slated for a March release.

The Brit Award-winner was played the nameless, invite-only club — a tile mosaic on the floor outside the front door reads “Community,” but it cannot be found under that name online — co-owned by Bryan Ling, manager of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.

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She took to the stage around 9pm. In the 25 minutes she was there, Marling played only those four songs and didn’t name them, but said it was the first time she had performed them to an audience, which included Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner.

Her last run of American shows, in support of her fourth LP ‘Once I Was An Eagle’, saw her performing in tiny venues off of the usual tour routes with little more than a couple acoustic guitars kept in the back of her rental car. Her return last night, though, featured a full band and Marling on the electric guitar for three of the four songs. “It’s fun to have guitar pedals and to try and make as many weird sounds as possible,” she said of playing the new material live after the minimalism of her solo tour.

Her first track was a jangly tune set in New York’s Upper West Side, a departure from anything on ‘Once I Was An Eagle’. Her adopted hometown also found her penning lyrics about posting letters out of Central LA to a man she would’ve left with, had he taken her away. “]I can’t be your horse anymore/You’re not the warrior I’ve been looking for” she sang on another track, adding later in the song, “I’m just a horse with no name/Somewhere, there are other beasts who think the same” .

The lyricism and fingerpicking maintained the sound Marling has become associated with, but the heavier inclusion of electric guitar showed her pushing into new territory.

The evening was presented by independent audio blog Aquarium Drunkard, who recorded the set for a forthcoming Aquarium Drunkard session.

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