RIP, Rig And Panic avant-pop singer Neneh Cherry will release her fifth solo album, Broken Politics, on October 19 on the Smalltown Supersound label.

Cherry, 54, who made her mark as a counter-culture protest pop act in the 1980s and Nineties, has picked Shot Gun Shack as the second single off an album produced by Four Tet's Kieran Hebden.

Continuing Cherry's blurring of the personal and the political, Shot Gun Shack tackles the link between violence and deprivation, using poetic logic. A "shot gun shack" or "shot gun house" was the most popular type of house in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s, originating in New Orleans, and the song deals with the ever-present global issue of gun violence in society today.

The track title sprang from a half-remembered conversation Cherry had at the funeral of late jazz musician Ornette Coleman. "I don't even remember who said it, but I was like, 'Shotgun shack! That's a cool term'," she says. "The song's about gun culture, the notion of war zones and the tragedies that guns bring there. The dealing of arms. Street culture. The gun is a powerful thing: dangerous, but powerful."

Cherry, the daughter of Oklahoma jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, grew up in rural Sweden, early 1980s' Alphabet City, New York City and post-punk era Bristol and London and achieved her biggest success with her 1989 debut album, Raw Like Sushi and its hit single, Buffalo Stance.

Work on Broken Politics began as touring wound down behind Cherry's 2014 opus, Blank Project, and she felt a drive to continue creating after collaborating on that record with Four Tet's Kieran Hebden.

"That last album was much angrier and forceful, whereas this one is quieter and more reflective," she says. "I haven't always been so good at getting things out so quickly, and it still took a while, but that's okay."

Cherry, writing partner Cameron McVey and Hebden decamped to Woodstock, New York, for a week-long recording session at the Creative Music Studio, a recording space founded by jazz pianist Karl Berger, once a member of Don Cherry's band as well as being friends with her mother.

York Press:

Wolfgang Tillmans' portrait photograph of Neneh Cherry

"Being in a studio with them was like being in a familiar space. It was easy to reach into myself for the feelings I needed to be in tune with for a song -and at night Cameron and I would have dinner with Ingrid and Karl and they'd tell stories about my father. There were deep threads," says Cherry.

"It was one of the best writing periods I've had in a really long time. I got out of the waiting room and into the inner sanctum."

Reflecting on the album title, she says: "I'm very shy about taking on big themes with the airs that I've got a solution — who has the  solutions?

"I like writing from a personal perspective, and the time we live in is so much about finding your own voice. People have been left feeling misheard, misunderstood, and disillusioned. What can I do? Maybe politics starts in your bedroom, or your house: a form of activism, and a responsibility.

"The album is about all of those things: feeling broken, disappointed, and sad, but having perseverance. It's a fight against the extinction of free thought and spirit."

Cherry's worldly vision seeped intio Broken Politics. "I have a name. You have a name. We're not just these faceless mounds you can put in the ground," she says. "We're human beings with lives and stories." 

The full track listing will be: Fallen Leaves; August single Kong; Poem Daddy; Synchronised Devotion; Deep Vein Thrombosis; Faster Than The Truth; Natural Skin Deep; Shot Gun Shack; Black Monday; Cheap Breakfast Special; Slow Release and Soldier.

Broken Politics, by the way, will feature artwork by the 2000 Turner Prize-winning Wolfgang Tillmans,, best known as a documentarian of London and Berlin’s club and gay scenes.