LAW Holt is tricky to describe. Though there are discernible elements of hip hop, soul and electronica, the Leicester-raised vocalist, who now splits her time between London and Edinburgh, makes music that is more easily felt than explained.

Her debut album, City, out later this month, broods with a sense of disconnection, of the particular loneliness that often comes with being surrounded by the harsh concrete of the urban environment and people dashing about in their own worlds, headphones clasped over their ears, eyes transfixed on their smartphones.

“I’m watching all these people rushing around,” she says, speaking from a railway station in London. “And some of them are chatting, sitting with their friends and loved ones. And then it’s back to whatever else is on their schedule. Is that it? A half hour’s face to face contact with someone, and then back to the grind? And what if you don’t have a loved one? It’s so difficult to make a real connection with people these days. We’re meant to have all these wonderful ways of contacting people these days, but really they are ways of avoiding each other, of keeping us apart. Before, if you were meeting someone and you couldn’t make it, you would have to tell them on the phone or stand them up. The stakes are much lower now. And it’s keeping us in a state of emotional arrested development.”

Holt, who will be familiar to anyone who’s seen her memorable live performances – she made the air positively bristle at Glasgow’s St Lukes in May when she opened for Ghostface Killah as part of the Restless Natives festival – shares a manger with Young Fathers. Like that slippery, genre-defying trio, Holt’s slightly wonky, emotive sound richly rewards repeated listens.

“That’s what we want,” she says. “We want the listener to do a bit of work, not just pick something up to be thrown away.”

The “we” refers to manager Tim London, who is the only other musician on The City, an album recorded in his Soulpunk studio in Leith. Remarkably, each of the ten tracks were laid down within an hour of Holt writing them. That’s not to say there is not a sharp pop sensibility at work: tracks such as the exuberantly romantic Love Drive Through and Summer’s Coming – the latter currently streaming on her Soundcloud page – are radio-friendly cuts, albeit bittersweet ones.

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When Holt explains London’s backstory, things start to click into place. Way back in 1990, he wrote Soho’s Hippychick, a mercurial, highly original track which sampled Johnny Marr’s swirling riff from How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths sequenced over a compulsive Soul II Soul rhythm. A worldwide hit, it remains both a radio staple and a reminder of how forward-thinking that pre-millenial era often was. In a pleasing twist, the sisters which formed Soho, Jacqui and Pauline Cuff, are Holt’s backing singers when she performs live.

“I met Tim through Jacqui, my boss when I worked in the Salvation Army shop on Leith Walk,” explains Holt. “She once asked me: ‘Everyone has a thing. What is your thing?’ I told her I was a singer – I had a band called Jade and The Jacks – and she said I should meet her husband who was a producer.”

Holt immediately connected with London, and his other wards Young Fathers, with whom Holt wrote the excellent Hustle and Haters, tracks which attracted almost immediate acclaim in 2013. Unfortunately, an unprovoked attack left Holt needing a series of operations to save her sight. Writing and performing, were of course, put on hold. Finally able to write again, she drew much from that period of recuperation.

“I was on my own a lot. You know when you’re on your own, and you hope you are going to spend your time doing something self-improving, something productive? But then you just watch terrible TV and get sucked into social media and looking at pictures of all these people who are better looking than you and are having – or seem to be having – a much better time at ‘doing life’ than you? And you think: ‘What the f*** am I doing? Wasting my time making myself feel bad.

“Social media is destroying us slowly from the inside and we don’t talk about it. It needs to be taken seriously because it’s so detrimental.”

That quest for authenticity, for making a real connection, is what drives her music, and is something she genuinely wishes City will somehow inspire in others.

“What I would love to happen is for people to sometimes get off their bus or train a stop or two earlier than usual,” says Holt, who has also recorded an album solely of love songs, for release next year. “And actually look around their communities, their streets, instead of looking at their phones. They might just make that connection with someone.”

City is released on August 26 on Soulpunk.