If you missed out on hearing last year’s debut album from New Englander Merrill Garbus aka Tune-Yards, you missed a gem of animated experimental pop. "Bird-brains" blended lo-fi bedroom folk with African rhythms and nursery rhyme chants all put together using shareware mixing software and digital voice recorders. Here at Altsounds we described it thus: “If Fever Ray’s album was the dark twilight world of insomnia directed by Ingmar Bergman, Tune-Yards’ record is a sunshine-lawn double-dutch-skip directed by David Lynch”.

Now to accompany a short European tour before returning to play Glastonbury this summer here is new material: the single ‘Real Live Flesh’. Both this song and B-side ‘Youth’ are slight variations on the "Bird-brains" template: both have denser, slow-downed rhythms, they both are less flighty and abandoned than the debut album but both are still unmistakably Tune-Yards.

Wailing and scraping opens ‘Real Live Flesh’ before it settles down to sludgey industrial rhythms with Garbus crying "I’m not your fantasy”. As per the David Lynch reference, the background ‘eehs’ ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ are more unsettling than sexy, this ‘Real Live Flesh’ peepshow is more glitchy and spooky than slinky and teasing.

‘Youth’ has more of a burly swagger to it than the hyperactive hopping and skipping of ‘Birdbrains’: a quirky repeated guitar riff accompanied by echoing drums, clanging percussion and more concrete-block scraping. The cryptic lyrics appear to suggest that the young of the title “chomping at the bit” are a virulent tide about to be unleashed on the rest of mankind. The nursery rhymes of ‘Bird-brains’ have become darker and more nightmarish.

Together the songs make an unlikely single – there are other tunes on the debut album more catchy or radio-friendly even in their lofi and raw form. But ‘Real Live Flesh’ serves as a compelling companion piece to "Birdbrains" and shows that there is still more surprises and invention up Merrill Garbus’s sleeve.