If you’ve been introduced to Cat Burns through Celebrity Traitors, you might assume she’s a tough nut to crack.
As a player, she’s cautious, cunning, inscrutable. Her cards are firmly clasped to her chest. She’s foxier than Fantastic Mr Fox, with as many lives as her name suggests.
People who’ve heard her music know that’s a façade.
Her debut album, Early Twenties, was full of chatty self-interrogation and emotional candour, as Burns described falling in love, coming out to her family, and the social anxiety of her autism and ADHD.
Powered by the breakout single Go, a raw but soulful break-up ballad, it earned the 25-year-old a Mercury Prize nomination for album of the year.
Six months later, she was whisked off to Ardross Castle to become the pot-stirring, strategic mastermind of the Traitors’ new spin-off series.
By that point, Burns had largely finished her second album, How To Be Human, so anyone hoping for musical treachery and skullduggery will be disappointed: There are no cash-in covers of Talking Head’s Psycho Killer, or Macy Gray’s I Committed Murder.
Death, however, lingers over the album like a dense fog, as Burns grapples with the loss of her father on Christmas Day 2020, and her grandfather, John Burns, who passed away last April., external
