David Gray is back doing what he does better than almost anyone, and fans of complex, serious, lyrical songcraft should rejoice.

Dear Life may be the deepest, strangest, loveliest album this pioneering British singer-songwriter has ever delivered.

Years in the making, it is an album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance.

Dear Life is David Gray's 13 th album. It's the result of "a starburst of songwriting _ it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind.

An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance.

While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.