The truth: Think Julie London and London Grammar, in a Manchester backstreet. The buzz: 'Peerless unsettling tripped out twisted soultronica of some distinction.' Nice, with a discreet injection of nasty. They've even got a couple of Christmas songs - Silent Night and Crimbs - which have a strange allure all their own. They have other tracks on their Bandcamp, such as the Bit EP, that are well worth checking out, especially Mellow, which despite its superficial charms is, as we keep warning you, anything but, and Bamboo, where the sweet singing is at odds with - at right angles to - the Oriental rhythm. Car Window is little more than a murmur, but move nearer, ignore the lulling synths, and you can just about make out a young woman crying inconsolably to herself.

Poppy itself opens with ominously tolling bells before the main event: askew supperclub soul, like Sade in hell. Similarly, the music features all manner of eerie atmospherics, disruptive beats and industrial effects, so that a song like Eyes On You, from the EP, sounds like a torch song that, on closer inspection, reveals horrible blemishes and scars. Caroll's vocals are soothing and sultry, but they have a disconcerting quality about them, too, suggestive of beauty disfigured. Heard cursorily, Bernard + Edith's music could be London Grammar-style slow and seductive post-trip hop or xx-ish ambient noir, but it's more idiosyncratic and subtly dislocating than that, more brooding with an undertow of menace, as you can tell from the Poppy EP, released by Sways, the label that brought us Money and Naked On Drugs.

Teen-age Manual by Edith Heal