When Natalie Mering, who performs beneath the moniker Weyes Blood, set out to comply with up her critically acclaimed album Titanic Rising, she wished to make one thing that was “really upbeat and hopeful; not so doomsday.” The 2019 document delved into the perils of local weather change, the disillusionment with how expertise guidelines over romance and the battle to find hope throughout difficult instances.
But the arrival of the pandemic modified Mering’s focus.
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While Titanic Rising felt like a warning of what might be forward, Mering’s new album, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow (out now on Sub Pop), tackles what occurs when our world crumbles and society has to rebuild itself.
“Everything I felt like I talked about and observed on Titanic Rising came true and we were in the thick of it,” says Mering, sitting on the desk in her New York City resort room, talking a couple of hours earlier than having to fly again to Los Angeles. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t be trite and pretend that this is a happy time for humanity. I have to go deep in the internal and access a subterranean river of deeper feelings.'”
With the huge success of Titanic Rising, which turned Mering into one in all indie rock’s largest singer-songwriters, she wished to make it possible for this follow-up would meet the very excessive expectations of followers. “I felt like I couldn’t deliver a record that was half-assed, so I spent a lot of time refining it. I worked really hard to make sure that it was something I was really proud of, and it took a little while,” Mering says.
She started recording And In The Darkness in 2021. But Mering did not need it to be an “in-a-vacuum, pandemic album,” deciding to regroup after experiencing the first two months of Los Angeles opening up, and penning new songs that additionally captured her complicated feelings as she adjusted to life post-lockdown.
For this LP, Mering reunited with producer Jonathan Rado, who additionally labored on Titanic Rising, and enlisted an all-star roster of musicians, together with Mary Lattimore on harp, Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) on synths and Meg Duffy (who performs beneath the title Hand Habits) on guitar. She wished this LP to be simpler to carry out than Titanic Rising, with “deeper sounds and less dense, but more lush.”
And In The Darkness units a wistful tone instantly, opening with hovering strings in “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” the place Mering questions if anybody really is aware of who she is — and if she even is aware of herself.
“[On the LP], there are a lot of themes about intimacy on the micro and the macro level. I do think the pandemic probably brought that up for a lot of people, especially people around my age who aren’t married yet, who just work a lot and have a lot of friends. And then all of a sudden when you’re like, ‘OK, you can only see one friend or one family member,’ when you’re really forced to reckon with who your pod is, I think that’s when a lot of questions come up. You’re like, ‘Who am I?'” explains Maring.
When the pandemic hit, Mering discovered herself remoted at residence after touring in assist of Titanic Rising. Used to her life on the highway, her house wasn’t a comfy sanctuary. She recollects that earlier than lockdown, her residence barely had decor. “I got to get homier and dig into that, cook a lot of food like everybody else did — but I did feel like it was a reckoning,” she displays.
It was a difficult time for Mering, who contracted “OG COVID” and suffered from the long-term results of the virus for 3 months. She notes that although the document’s lyrics had been written in 2020, they nonetheless ring true, as folks, together with herself, are “pretty cracked from the experience because it exposed this idea that the issues we’re facing, [such as] the uncertainty of climate change and the way our health system is structured is really unsustainable.”
[Photo by Neelam Khan Vela]
On a private stage, Mering additionally skilled the dissolution of a relationship throughout the top of the pandemic. That breakup impressed “Grapevine,” which she describes as an “existential love song” the place she processes letting go of a poisonous dynamic that now not serves her.
“He was somebody who was pretty damaged and had a lot of wounds that he would project onto me and vice versa,” says Mering, reflecting on the relationship. The tune’s title references California’s Interstate 5, a drive that the musician and her former companion would usually take collectively. “I thought that was kind of cool: We were driving on the grapevine freeway, and then the concept of the grapevine being this vine to your wound map of every past relationship tends to come up in a new one, or you just tend to repeat the same pattern over and over again,” she notes.
The central theme of And In The Darkness is disillusionment. Not simply in relationships, however in dealing with the unknown, extra misplaced than ever. Mering notes that whereas writing the document, she was processing her feelings, whereas in panic mode as her world drastically modified.
She recollects that whereas speaking to mates, they might additionally categorical how tough the lockdown interval was for them, making her understand that this sense of hopelessness was common. “I felt like we needed to talk about what was causing that existential dread — if it was isolation, if it was climate uncertainty, if it was just the structure of our society becoming really tedious and exhausting,” she says.
Even nonetheless, after diving into these questions and popping out of the hardest instances, Mering is protecting an optimistic outlook. “This record was working out the nuances,” she says. “The next one [will] hopefully be more about solutions and a futuristic form of hope and transcendence from the gridlocked modernity struggle of being on this technological frontier and having no choice.” Much like the title of the LP, Mering is striving to find the glowing hope in the darkness.
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