If you’ve been wondering who owns the sultry female voice singing on several tracks on Mark Ronson’s new album (the collaborative spectacular Record Collection), you might be interested to learn it’s none other than English pop ingenue Rose Elinor Dougall.

To the more astute music aficionados out there, that name will certainly have a ring of familiarity. Between 2003 and 2008, she was one third of the Pipettes, the retro pop-girl group whose Phil Spector–inspired harmonies (and wardrobe of matching polka dot rah-rah skirts) received a lot of attention in their native Great Britain. After she left the band in 2008, Dougall decided to shed the sixties aesthetic and spent eighteen months perfecting a new sound that brought her songwriting in a more personal direction. 

“I’m really glad that I took as long as I did,” she explains. “Having come out of the Pipettes, I needed to feel like I was making something that was mine and that I was doing it for the right reasons."

The resulting album, Without Why, which was released in the U.K. this summer, is a refreshing, sophisticated debut, that frequently achieves indie-pop perfection. Dreamy ballads such as “Start/Stop/Synchro” have more in common sonically with Zach Condon than the Ronettes, and give off an air of effortless maturity. The same can be said for Dougall’s new monochromatic color scheme and Godard-esque je ne sais quoi, although she admits the look of the album was the last thing on her mind during the recording process." I was keen to avoid any visual gimmicks," she says. "Instead, I wanted to capture a cinematic quality to some of the songs. My favorite sort of music is music that creates images while you listen."

WATCH : Video for “Start/Stop/Synchro