First up are a handful of dates around the U.K. club scene at the end of July, with more expected to be added. Topley-Bird is also scheduled to join Massive Attack, Tricky’s old bandmates, in Bristol for a show August 25.

It’s been about four years since Topley-Bird began work on her debut solo record, Quixotic. Although she’s no stranger to the recording studio, making an album of her own was a completely different game.

“It may seem like a long time but it’s a different thing when you’re doing it on your own,” Topley-Bird recently told The Independent newspaper. “My record label did give me a couple of deadlines and I tried really hard to meet them. But there’s the time that you take writing and making something and then there’s the time you take to run away for a bit, so you can come back and go, ‘Is it OK?’

“I was unaccustomed to making music and having to show it to somebody and be responsible for it. It took a lot of getting used to.”

Topley-Bird wasn’t alone in the studio, though. Quixotic also features Irish DJ David Holmes on one track, and American rockers Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan of Queens Of The Stone Age on another – to say nothing of the all-star cast of mixers and producers, including Tchad Blake, Hugo Nicholson (of Primal Scream) and Tricky.

But if the critics have anything to say about it – and they do – the album is worth the wait. It’s already getting rave reviews in the U.K., where it’s due to drop July 14 through Independiente.