WRY American songwriter Katie Von Schleicher plays The Basement at City Screen, York, tomorrow night, topping an 8pm bill also featuring Fawn and Dead Bird.

Von Schleicher’s debut album, Bleaksploitation, was an accident, years in the making. During her internship at Ba Da Bing Records, owner Ben Goldberg offered her the chance to make a cassette for the New York label to release.

It could be anything, demos or a live performance, he said, but she took it a bit more seriously than Goldberg intended. The result was her first self-produced and engineered work, a strange, hazy, pop-laden tape. Doing her own press under a pseudonym, Von Schleicher garnered enough attention for Bleaksploitation to see it released on vinyl in the spring of last year.

Her debut full-length release, Sh***y Hits, has followed this year with its warped and uncompromising sound as Von Schleicher confronts feelings of isolation and powerlessness in her dark torch songs.

Conjuring the home recorded sound of Paul McCartney’s McCartney or Jeff Buckley’s Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk, the album was created on a tape machine at Von Schleicher’s childhood home in Maryland. Where Bleaksploitation courted a kind of sonic nihilism, Sh***y Hits shows confidence and growth.

"We're delighted to be promoting a tiny York headline show for this wonderful Maryland singer-songwriter," says Please Please You gig booker Joe Coates. "Katie has been on tour with Surfer Blood and is soon to be in the UK opening for Big Thief; her new album on Ba Da Bing, Sh***y Hits, is a winner."

Tickets cost £6.50 in person from The Basement, Earworm Records, in York, and Jumbo Records, in Leeds, or at pleasepleaseyou.com. Von Schleicher also plays Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Wednesday.