YOU may recall The Cardigans calling their first album Emmerdale after the muck-and-brassed off Yorkshire soap opera. It was enough to win the cool Swedes a place in northern hearts, a relationship cemented by glacial vocalist Nina Persson’s subsequent explorations in A Camp.

Then silence, at least on the recording front since A Camp’s second album, Colonia, in 2009 although The Cardigans reappeared for shows in 2012.

Persson had considered giving music her P45 in favour of a new career as a doctor, and there had been the “distractions” of the birth of her first child in 2010 and a cancer scare too.

Music has won out, however, Persson making her first solo record, Animal Heart, on which she contemplates maternity and materialism, relationships and alienation, the grip of the past and the need for new goals.

Although a solo enterprise by name, the album was written and produced by Nina with her husband, film composer, novelist and A Camp member Nathan Larson and The Shins’ Eric D Johnson.

The lovely, floating Persson voice remains the lead character, and Swedish-crafted indie synth pop is still her signature tune, at its best on the retro title track, the pure pop of Food For The Beast and The Grand Destruction Game and the slow, lush beauty of Forgot To Tell You.

However, too many other tracks are clad in a Volvo-style safety-first design until the closing brace of the moon-lit Silver and This Is Heavy Metal, a piano ballad that Streisand or Bassey would love.