During ‘Designer Citizen’, she stands like a figurehead at a ship’s bow. Barely moving, her gaze is so piercing it reaches past the audience and church walls, over London and across the Atlantic, all the way to the White House, the object of her sardonic derision. She cultivates an intimate connection with the audience between songs with unexpected snippets from her personal life — the first thing she says to her partner when she wakes up each morning is ‘I forgive you’. ‘Most of these songs tonight have an upside,’ she says introducing ‘The Lost Sky’. ‘The only upside of this next song is that it was written.’ She began it, she explains, while a friend was in a coma — a situation which in the hands of less singular artists might have produced a weepy ballad, but in Hoop’s it birthed something darkly urgent, throbbing with borderline panic. ‘I have a note here on my paper,’ she says later, encoding her vulnerability in humorous self-effacement. ‘It says: swallow.’

During the encore, she plays the epic closer and title track from Long Wave Home: a search for meaningful connection in a world alienated from itself by technology. As we exit the church a few minutes later (Hoop already at the merch table, her otherworldly charisma making her appear a giant) there is a pervasive feeling the evening has provided a welcome antidote to all that.