It is on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon's new studio album began to bloom. During the day, as a true jack-of-all-trades, Le Bon was painstakingly learning to make tables, stools, and solid wood chairs; at night, with only a second-hand Meers, the very first piano she ever owned, for company, she poured out her heart. The result is Reward, an album that is as surreal and tactile as her previous creations, but which is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal record to date. Reward moves away from the more traditional notes of Crab Day (2016) with a tendency towards electronics in its dominant use of synthesizers. To bring the album to life, Le Bon and Samur Khouja, co-producer and engineer, isolated themselves for an extended period in the Joshua Tree desert, where a group of musicians bound by trust and friendship joined them gradually: Josiah Steinbrick, Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) on drums and percussion, Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone, and her collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars. After the second album of Drinks, her project with Tim Presley of White Fence, and her production work on Deerhunter's recent album, Cate Le Bon's fifth album was highly anticipated. The wait has been rewarded. It features biting, ironic, and often surreal imagery. The multiple facets of Le Bon's talent, her ability to offer different levels of interpretation with patterns that are not immediately obvious, are evident even in the album's name, which serves as a warning against easy comparisons and value judgments.