The release of her fourth album, Once I Was an Eagle, this May earned British folkie Laura Marling her third consecutive Mercury Prize nomination, and for good reason. The forceful, unadorned record culls heavily from the English folk tradition, bearing shadows of Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan and the like, but Marling has also established a sound very much her own. On songs like "Master Hunter," an open-tuned, Eastern-tinged guitar drones alongside a driving drumbeat while Marling, in her sultry and vivid contralto, cagily quotes Dylan and muses on the beauty inherent in loneliness. This restlessness is what sets her apart. Though her music is accessible in a certain nu-folk sense, lyrically, Marling opts for mystery over earnestness, "who?" over "hey!".