Sheltered from a bitter London morning, Isobel Waller-Bridge expresses her gratitude to an orange ping pong ball.

“I love the ball so much. It showed me how I can actually use these sounds – running them through different effects, layering, bringing out natural harmonics through reverb. There’s something about the combination of something being really ordinary becoming really magical.”

Waller-Bridge is discussing Ball, the first (and her favourite) track recorded for Objects, a solo album she released in December. Many of the tracks began in the same way – investigating commonplace objects and extracting a colourful world, rich with sound and stories.

Isobel Waller-Bridge. Photo © Bob Foster

“I didn’t labour over which objects to choose,” she tells Limelight. “They need to be the most ordinary things. They can’t have any kind of outstanding features about them. I was thinking, ‘What makes something beautiful? Why can’t the sound of a Hoover be beautiful?’”

“In my mind, this narrative begins to form [triggered by the Hoover] of a person on their own, tidying their space.”

Waller-Bridge is an...