The Gore Hotel is your author’s most treasured London lodging -- if only for the memory of chatting up a louche Alison Goldfrapp slung provocatively over a baroque armchair. More importantly, this Victorian rockstar fave (it also makes a Gallagher brothers related appearance in the brilliant Britpop film Live Forever) has always boasted one of the hippest watering holes in the capital. And newly opened this May is the clubby Bar 190’s eccentrically fabulous Cinderella’s Carriage.

The U.K. chanteuse takes off her disco vixen guise and slips into something decidedly more intimate.

Alison Goldfrapp is retiring glitter and stepping off the dance floor—at least for now. After 2006’s lusty breakthrough Supernature, the British chanteuse, who records as Goldfrapp with musical partner Will Gregory, was poised to sex-up the electronic music scene. Instead, she explains from a Paris hotel, she discovered acoustic guitars and even a 17th century harp, which decorates the shimmery “Road to Somewhere” on Seventh Tree, the band’s lovely, hazy fourth album. Surprising? Not exactly, for a band that has both mined burbling electronics and icy, cinematic canvases over the course of three disparate albums. This time, “we wanted to do something more intimate—with more warmth,” Goldfrapp explains about the sonic shift. It’s a stylistic departure, sure, but Seventh Tree is as stylized as anything Goldfrapp has recorded.