Towards the end of Leos Carax's 1991 film ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’ (‘The Lovers on the Bridge’), its drifting protagonists, a struggling artist and a half-blind painter, careen down the Seine as the city explodes with fireworks, the destitute lovers briefly possessing all of Paris. 
Carax’s vision of love was a construction where worlds could be rebuilt and seen from the position of two – physical exaltations pitched against despair, light against dark, beauty and ruin struck from the same flint – a vision the South London songwriter couldn’t shake. 
Where Mann’s 2025 debut album Rift sat in a single strange, isolated shade of blue, Wishbone is built instead on contrast: a record with a kind of luminosity running through it, the brightest passages made legible by shadow. 

From the very beginning of Wishbone, Mann found herself attempting something that had never come naturally to her. After the nostalgic introspection of Rift, she was determined to imagine good things for herself, and believe they might actually be within reach. It was, she says, a frightening decision – to picture a life that’s beautiful and allow herself to want it. 
Mann likens the wishbone image that gives the record its name to Marina Abramović's ‘Rest Energy’, the performance in which artist and partner hold a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies – a single gesture living in total trust and the possibility of ruin. 
It’s an emblem of love, but also of the larger wager the album keeps making; wanting good things, and letting other people want them for you, is worth the risk of the break. It’s a concept that’s never only romantic in Mann’s world – it stands for the whole precarious business of being held by anyone at all. 
Ultimately, that sense of presence is also what most clearly separates this record from the last. In Rift, we heard Mann still full of open questions; Wishbone has little of that backward pull. 
Now in her mid-20s, she writes from conviction more than question, feeling more than place. She leans deliberately into the songwriting tradition, reaching for the rough-edged, performance-driven spirit of artists like Fiona Apple and Tom Waits while keeping faith with an older lineage of plainspoken English balladry.