One afternoon in June of last year, Natalie Mering, the indie musician who performs as Weyes Blood, was working on a new album at EastWest, a storied recording studio in Hollywood. The album, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” which comes out on November 18th, is her first since “Titanic Rising,” in 2019. For the cover of “Titanic Rising,” Mering had an elaborate re-creation of her teen-age bedroom submerged in a back-yard pool, and was photographed underwater, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was a nostalgic image rendered deeply eerie. The album, her fourth, was her breakthrough, critically acclaimed for the imaginative way Mering had recast the Laurel Canyon folk-pop of the nineteen-seventies for a new era of existential unease. Mering half-jokingly described the record to me as “a doomer classic.”
EastWest, which is on Sunset Boulevard, was the fanciest place Mering had ever recorded. The building, from 1933, had once been a burlesque joint called Madame Zucca’s Hollywood Casino and had been taken over in the early sixties by Bill Putnam, the pioneering audio engineer known for inventing many modern recording techniques. The Beach Boys made “Pet Sounds” there; EastWest is where the Mamas and the Papas recorded “California Dreamin’ ” and “Monday, Monday.” The ceilings were high, the equipment sumptuous. Inside, it was as cool and dim as a bank vault. A string quartet would not be out of place there, and that day Mering had brought one in.
Her previously recorded vocals for a new song, “Grapevine,” filled the control room. Mering has a warm, pure alto voice that has often been compared with Karen Carpenter’s—though it’s less sugary than Carpenter’s sometimes sounded. I’d never heard “Grapevine” before, but it exerted a curious effect that I’d noticed with other Weyes Blood songs, all of which Mering writes. The first time you hear them, you feel the swell of bittersweet emotion that usually comes from songs that you already know and have overlaid with memories and associations. “If a man can’t see his shadow / he can block your sun all day,” went the opening lines of “Grapevine.” Mering told me later that the song was about breaking up with a “narcissistic” musician she’d been “madly in love with” during the pandemic. She had been sick with long covid, though she hadn’t known at the time what was afflicting her, and he kept telling her that she was depressed, or just had to get outdoors or exercise more. “I basically needed to leave him to go be sick on my own with my mysterious illness that nobody understood yet,” she said. “And it was heartbreaking.” (She has now recovered, and the ex has apologized.)
The song’s title refers to a stretch of California highway known as the Grapevine—the steep grade on I-5 that takes you out of the farmland of the San Joaquin Valley, over the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, and into the vast, glittering bowl of Los Angeles County. If you are coming home to the city, where Mering lives, from the north, it’s the final stretch of road-trip driving, and there’s a romance to it. In the winter, the pass can become so shrouded in dense fog that big-rig trucks get stranded. Mering used to drive on the highway often to see her ex. “Grapevine” is a breakup song, but in typical Weyes Blood fashion it also evokes more apocalyptic sorrows. “California’s my body,” she sings. “And your fire runs over me.”
Mering’s played-back voice had a melancholy grandeur when set against the live strings, which were lush and cinematic. She sounded like an embodiment of womanly wisdom—a cool hand on a fevered brow. The actual Mering in the studio exuded a game, tomboyish energy. She was cheerfully in charge. She sat on a black leather couch listening to the track, her chin resting on a tented knee, with her dog, a rescued Pomeranian named Luigi, nestled next to her. Periodically, she sprang to her feet and headed over to the console to talk to the engineer, Andrew Sarlo, or to the album’s co-producer, Jonathan Rado, or to the musicians on the other side of the glass. At one point, she requested “more arpeggiation”; at other moments, she asked for sounds that were “less classical” or “more jammy.”
“That first entrance to the cello?” she told the musicians. “You can totally swell that. Because it’s such a pretty note, I’d love to hear it come out a little more.”
Mering, who is thirty-four, has long, straight brown hair worn parted in the middle; her ears peek out from the glossy curtains, Galadriel style. She was wearing the same outfit that I’d seen her in earlier that week at the studio: slim, high-waisted brown tweed trousers with a tucked-in white T-shirt, orange socks, and Nikes. “That sounds wrong,” she declared at one point. “Can we try a pass where the violin is quieter?” Mering has the good posture of a choir kid, which she was in high school, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She stood up tall behind Sarlo, who said, “It’s a C-natural at bar eight.”
Mering, bouncing on the balls of her feet, said, “Can we try C-sharp? Is that crazy?”
When she heard it, she grinned and swayed to the music. “Now that sounds right.”
Earlier, Mering had described another new song as having the “vibe” of “Whiter Shade of Pale”—a song that, in turn, had a “Bach vibe.” That reminded her of how Jim Morrison and the Doors, whom she loves, had come up with “Riders on the Storm” while jamming on a 1948 cowboy song, “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Learning about such inspired pastiches, she said, made her feel better “about all the influences that come out in my music.” She noted, “People have been doing that since the dawn of time.”
Mering’s collaborators describe her as having an uncommonly confident artistic vision, but one that she pursues through a lot of improvisation and open-ended experimentation. In addition to singing and writing songs, she plays guitar, piano, bass, and drums. “I can make noise out of anything,” she said. “But mainly guitar.” Rado, an acclaimed indie producer who is also a member of the band Foxygen, told me that Mering was “deliberate and freewheeling at the same time,” adding, “She’s not necessarily looking for the perfect take, but she’s looking for the perfect vibe—always trying to get at something with the right feeling and emotion. And she’s down to take as long as it needs to get there.”
Like many artists of her generation, Mering has a complicated relationship to nostalgia. At a time when pop and indie music of all eras—including the deep cuts once accessible only in musty record stores—can be instantly found online, it can be tempting to escape our twitchily demoralized present and lose yourself in a romantic version of the musical past. At the rented house in Pasadena that Mering shares with a roommate, the living room is dominated by a used grand piano; when I visited, Joni Mitchell and Elton John songbooks were open on its music shelf. On a nearby wall, Mering has hung, in a frame, the lyrics of a song by the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Judee Sill, who died of an overdose in 1979, at the age of thirty-five. Sometimes, Mering told me, she thought of her own music as “atemporal” and felt a little bad about it, wondering if she wasn’t attuned enough to her own times.
In conversation, though, she often expressed a jaundiced view of contemporary trends. She had “a short fuse” for online dating. She preferred “fate” to “algorithms,” and “meeting people and falling in love in real life” to working the apps. She’d never made a checklist of what she was looking for in a partner. “I don’t think you know your soul’s mate,” she said. “You probably know your ego’s match. You can meet your ego mate, but how much fun is that going to be?” As an artist, she remained committed to an ethos that she associated with Gen X: she believed that it was possible, and desirable, for an ambitious musician to remain in “rebellion against mainstream music,” and not to default to pop as the aspirational category. Mering’s cohort is perhaps the last to harbor tactile memories of a world before omnipresent smartphones and a tentacular Internet, but not everybody her age is as wistfully pissed off about technology as she is. In 2019, she told the magazine The Believer that she was “a very nostalgic person,” adding, “I miss so much. I miss going to the video store and renting a video. I miss calling a friend on the landline. I miss when people couldn’t break a plan because they had no way to get in touch with you, so they couldn’t leave you hanging and just send you a bullshit text.”
Still, if Mering has often looked to the past, she has also expressed frustration with her elders—baby boomers, in particular. She especially resents the grip that boomer-era classic rock has held on everything from radio formats to song purchases. “Now that we’re all on streaming, you’re competing with every other music that’s ever been made at any time,” she told me. It was harder for new music to break through and define a generational identity. She’s not the only person to say this: the cultural critic Ted Gioia recently pointed out in The Atlantic that the streaming market is heavily skewed toward old songs, and radio stations are reducing the number of songs in their rotations. “I really do appreciate the greats,” Mering said. “But I would love to see new music and culture get a little more limelight. It’s already so disposable and so fragile, because we don’t have the same kind of ecosystem that these people had”—a captive radio audience and generous budgets for studio time and album promotion.
At first listen, Mering’s music might remind you uncannily of some long-lost track from the seventies that’s recently been rediscovered through TikTok or Spotify. Yet much of what makes her music feel contemporary is its relationship to the past—her capacity to conjure, with longing and irony, a period that was more bright-eyed about the future. Her lyrics combine a yearning for sincerity and conviction with a serene fatalism. “Give me something I can see / Something bigger and louder than the voices in me / Something to believe,” she sings on a track from “Titanic Rising,” the word “believe” quavering like a falling leaf. In the shimmering song “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” from the new album, Mering channels the disorientation caused by the pandemic: “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes / We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves.”
She doesn’t want her music to sound exactly like an artifact. In time, she and Rado decided that finessing the line between a too-on-the-nose retro sound and something more current required the delicate introduction of sonic effects—echo, delay, and what Rado likes to call “primitive sampling.” They wanted to layer in weird noises such that, as Rado said, “the average listener is not going to be, like, This is too weird for me.” To accomplish this artfully, they needed to take their time. They ended up leaving the costly EastWest and decamping to Rado’s own studio, Dreamstar II, a converted three-car garage in North Hollywood with a lot of instruments stacked everywhere and string lights looped haphazardly on the walls. Several weeks later, Mering and I met for tacos at HomeState—a Tex-Mex place in Pasadena whose menu includes a vegan item named after the singer Phoebe Bridgers’s pug—and she told me why the change in atmosphere had been important. At EastWest, she said, “you could really feel that room sound. It’s a really historical room, but also the chambers for the reverbs—we’d be, like, That’s the Beach Boys. It was so fun to record a band in there live, but after a while we need to go be primitive elsewhere. We can’t be, like, standing on the shoulders of these giants.” She laughed. “I’m not trying to make a tribute album.”
Mering is a movie lover, a big reader, and something of an autodidact. In conversation, she generates cultural references as abundantly as an air popper generates popcorn. She spoke to me with equal confidence of Ingrid Bergman’s “Method-y” performance in “Gaslight” and of Christopher Lasch’s despairing social critique “The Culture of Narcissism.” She dilated breezily on the career of the avant-garde composer, instrument inventor, and Depression-era hobo Harry Partch. She brought up Stanley Kubrick’s philosophy of, as she described it, “appealing to the subconscious more by saying less.” (Kubrick once said, of the minimal dialogue in “2001,” that he had tried “to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content.”) Mering told me that she takes a similar approach to writing music: “I love lyrics, I love folk music, but I do think there’s a lot of emotion in instrumental, melodic themes, and you can use them as your own canvas to paint feelings on.”
Mering’s family background and upbringing set her up nicely for the kind of cultural time travel she likes to engage in. Her mother’s mother was a vaudeville singer who once played the role of Indian Child in a lost silent movie called “The Gateway of the Moon.” Mering’s mother, Pamela, also sings; she had a florist’s shop in Santa Monica for a while, and when Natalie was little Pamela would sometimes take her along on deliveries and entertain her by crooning standards. Natalie’s father, Sumner Mering, was the good-looking front man of a New Wave band, called Sumner, which put out a record on Elektra/Asylum in 1980. Her parents got together after a mutual friend arranged a blind date; Pamela Mering told me that she agreed to it after hearing that Sumner had gone on a few dates with one of her musical idols—Joni Mitchell.
In the early eighties, Sumner became a born-again Christian. He eventually abandoned rock music and began a career in medical publishing. In 1999, when Mering was ten, she and her brother Zak moved with their parents to Pennsylvania. (Another brother, Ean, who is eleven years older than Mering, stayed in California.) Pamela told me, “We were a Christian family,” but added, “We came from an angle of nothing was impossible. ‘Look at God’s creation—how intricate, how wild and bizarre. You can do anything you put your mind to, don’t limit yourself, there’s freedom in Christ and God.’ We weren’t a religious household in the sense of having a lot of rules and regulations. We were kind of a different breed.”
Mering, who identifies more with Buddhism now, is close to her family. Her rental in Pasadena is a modestly sized ranch house, but Mering initially didn’t have a roommate, and found it too big to rattle around in alone, so her mother and Zak stayed with her for extended periods. “I’ve come to terms with their Christianity,” she told me as we talked in her dusty back yard, which had a badminton set, many succulents, ornamental trees, a birdbath, and mismatched patio furniture. The yard is visited regularly by a flock of feral peacocks, and they screeched as we sipped herbal tea, to which she had added, for tingly effect, the buds of a flowering plant called spilanthes. (When Mering was in her twenties, she briefly apprenticed with an herbalist on a farm in Kentucky.) She said of her parents, “I’m just very grateful that they were spiritual at all. I really appreciate their faith, even if it’s not the same kind that I have now. We can talk about God together. We’ve healed a lot. But obviously it can be hard growing up religious.” One upside was that she watched a lot of classic Hollywood movies at a young age, in part because they lacked explicit content.
As a little girl, Mering told me, “I was moody and weird, and I had a lot of extra emotional software that I didn’t know what to do with.” She said of herself, “I am a really high-functioning depressive. I definitely feel all the feels.” In middle school, Mering discovered the D.I.Y. music scene and began taking the train to Philadelphia to see punk and experimental music shows in run-down row houses and dank church basements. She particularly loved noise music that churned up discordant waves of feedback and fuzz, pounding her chest like rough surf. By the time she was fifteen, Mering had adopted the name Weyes Blood—inspired by the Flannery O’Connor novel “Wise Blood” and pronounced the same way—and was performing noise-music shows herself.
Jim Strong, an artist and a musician who dated Mering in high school and who remains a close friend, remembers meeting her for the first time, at a show at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. “We were introduced by a mutual friend, who said, ‘This is Natalie. She just built an eight-foot guitar.’ ” Mering, after coming across a book about experimental-instrument building, had learned how to put two guitars together with their necks touching—a contraption that produced, as she remembered, “a ghostly sound where you could only hear the harmonics of the strings.” (Mering lugged the chimerical guitar to gigs in a ski bag—the only case big enough for it.) Strong and his friends, who were a little older, were starting to make their own instruments out of found materials. “She was just immediately a weird little leader in this scene we were creating,” he recalled. He said that the young Mering “had an incredible depth of knowledge about avant-garde music.”
Mering, Strong, and their friends became interested in sixties “happenings” and the Fluxus art movement. In retrospect, their projects had something in common with the more political idea of “temporary autonomous zones”—uncommodifiable experiences that, as Strong put it, would only “last for a moment, and in story and memory.” They once staged an “upside-down-forest show”—taking “truckloads of branches and painstakingly tying them to the ceiling in this South Philly basement.”
Some fans of the dreamy chamber pop that Weyes Blood makes today might be surprised to know that she was once the lead screamer for a grindcore band called Satanized, whose performances sometimes involved exploding packets of fake blood. Around this time, Mering and Strong also had a performance-art act, the League of the Divine Wind. Their shows often featured the odd spectacle of the duo biting into fruit embedded with microphones, which amplified the sounds of their chewing and swallowing. “There was a lot of citrus,” Strong said. “It was very juicy. I think we may have overplayed our hands, in terms of the citrus factor.”
For a while, Mering found this scene very heady and inspiring. She told me that, at the time, she was convinced she was hearing the sound of the future: “It’s going to be noise—it’s going to move past the structure of music as we know it to something ecstatic and improvisational and on the cutting edge of sound design and expression.” Mering observed, “Instead of feeling like a regular singer-songwriter, I felt more like an explorer—exploring realms of sound for my generation.”
Mering went to study music at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, but she left after a year to make songs on her own, and to play with an experimental noise band called Jackie-O Motherfucker. She soon ended up back on the East Coast, bouncing between Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Baltimore, she lived for a time in a three-story abandoned warehouse that had been converted into a communal art-and-living space called Tarantula Hill. Twig Harper, the musician who ran it, let artists live there for next to nothing. It had a library, screen-printing equipment, a music studio, and a sensory-deprivation tank, but no central heating. Mering loved it there. She had started to write songs that anchored experimental noises with more traditional melodic structures. The results sounded a bit like Gregorian chants produced by Brian Eno. She said of the warehouse, “I made my first album there, and I could be loud and use the space and run around. Warehouses are to me so expansive—it’s kind of unlimited what you can do there. It’s, like, this alternative, liminal creative space.” In the winter, Mering sewed hot-water bottles into her sweaters; on the coldest days, everybody huddled around a wood-burning stove on the second floor. Mering said, “It was actually very cool, because we had a roommate community based on ‘We’ve got to build the fire and sit next to it.’ And we’d talk about things—talk about ideas.”
In 2011, Weyes Blood released her first album, “The Outside Room,” on a tiny label, Not Not Fun Records, playing all the instruments herself. It sounded lo-fi, spooky, and out-there—there was no call to release a single. Around this time, she used the entire modest advance that she received from a record label to get her wisdom teeth taken out. She recalled bursting into tears when she found a parking ticket on her car, wondering how she could possibly pay it. Before the success of her next two albums, she was admired by other musicians, but she “didn’t have a leg up or a patron,” and she got by with a string of day jobs, from census-taker to “dog-hiker,” which involved bringing packs of dogs into the woods to let them run around.
These impecunious years, she says, shaped her artistic outlook. “I felt like it was my responsibility to be excited about things that might not have the most capitalistic value but might have value for our psychology and be valuable in terms of expression,” she said. “It’s almost like that replaced the faith I grew up with as a kid in some ways. It didn’t replace God, but there was this idea of How do I help people? I’ve got to believe in the frontiers of art and music.” She went on, “It was always really important to me to make sure my generation didn’t get completely swallowed up by capitalism. Because it seemed to me that this was what was happening to millennials—and our music was really boring.” She recalls being a teen-ager and “asking my dad, because he was a musician, ‘When are we going to have the next wave? When is someone going to come and reinvent music again?’ Because we were getting ’NSync and Britney Spears and Hanson and the Spice Girls, and it was bad.” (She has lately grown more admiring of Spears.)
Men dominated the indie-music scene Mering was in, though she was a more technically proficient musician than most of them. Elaine Kahn, a poet who first met her in Philadelphia in 2007 and has stayed friends with her since, recalls getting emotional when she saw Mering perform the songs from “Titanic Rising” at a record-release party: “Though there were definitely people in that noise scene who fostered her talent, I was also thinking about all the dudes over the years who had tried to steal her light a little bit. Here she was, this beautiful young woman, who could play way better than most of them could. And they would try to make her their girlfriend, or their muse.”
I asked Mering about those gender politics. “Oh, I’ve been on tour with people where they’re, like, ‘If you don’t sleep with me on this tour, it’s gonna be the tour from living hell,’ ” she said. “Threatening me. Or somebody wants to work with you creatively but also wants to sleep with you a little bit.” We were driving to her house after a fitting for a music-video shoot—she had tried on white sailor pants, a jaunty sailor’s beret, and a striped T-shirt, for a scenario in which she would dance with a cartoon, like Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.” Instead of being paired up with a cartoon mouse, Mering would dance with a malevolent animated cell phone. (She talks often about how drained and exploited we are by self-obsolescing modern technology.) In the car, she had put on a nineteen-forties playlist—the Ink Spots, Frank Sinatra singing “I’ll Never Smile Again.” Perhaps the velvety vocals helped, but Mering turned out to be one of the calmest drivers I’ve ever shared a car with in L.A. traffic.
“I think I used to mute my sexuality and my femininity so that I could be considered a peer and a bro,” Mering observed. “And that has its own pitfalls. Learning how to basically turn my pheromones off in a situation and make it really, explicitly, subconsciously clear that nothing was going to happen. It’s a good skill to have, but it’s also a strange skill.”
In early 2016, Mering moved to Los Angeles, where she gravitated more strongly toward the singer-songwriter mode burnished by such seventies forbears as Harry Nilsson and Laura Nyro. Though she was still incorporating “weird sounds and tape loops,” she said, her music had been “morphing toward what I do now.” She noted, “As the songs got better, the noises got quieter, because they didn’t need the atmospheric support anymore.” It struck her that the truly “nonconformist thing to do” was to make music that was “as beautiful as possible.” Guys in noise music had liked it when she got loud and dissonant and crazy onstage. “They’d be, like”—she assumed a gruff dude voice—“ ‘You looked really good doing that.’ ” But Mering wanted to hone her songcraft, creating music replete with grace.
She recalled a distinct turning point. “I went to this international noise conference,” she said. “And I was playing in a basement and the amps caught on fire—I was playing so crazy and loud. I honestly felt like the Devil had showed up to my gig and said, ‘Don’t do this anymore.’ I mean, this was a basement full of people and the amps were on fire. And this was before the Ghost Ship fire.” (In December, 2016, a conflagration broke out during a show at the Ghost Ship, an alternative art-and-living space in Oakland that didn’t meet building codes; it killed thirty-six people, casting a shadow over the D.I.Y. scene.)
Mering decided that her new music would emphasize more accessible sounds—most notably her voice, which was honeyed and languid, but with a kind of dignified force that made her lyrics sound composed and oracular. The resulting album, “The Innocents,” which she released in 2014, had a cover reminiscent of a vintage folk LP: a simple black-and-white photograph of a ponytailed Mering in profile. Tracks such as “Land of Broken Dreams” and “Summer” harkened back to the mystical medievalism of sixties folk revivalists like Fairport Convention. In 2016 came “Front Row Seat to Earth,” an album that showcased a lyrical turn toward generational angst and pushed Mering’s vocals into a more ethereal register. But 2019’s “Titanic Rising,” which came out on the prominent indie label Sub Pop, represented a big musical leap, and it turned up on many album-of-the-year lists. There was less gloomy grandiosity and more hummable swing—a more knowing incorporation of soft-rock charm. The Guardian described it as “beauty deep enough to drown in” and “gorgeously smart.” Pitchfork noted that the “songs are more stoic and elegant even when Mering sings of apocalyptic imagery like a ‘million people burnin’.”
As Mering’s career has taken off, she has participated in buzzy collaborations that highlight her limpid vocals and “Licorice Pizza” style. She turned up on Lana Del Rey’s 2021 album, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” where she and the singer Zella Day harmonized with Del Rey on a gauzy cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” For the soundtrack to the recent “Minions” prequel, a compilation of seventies covers produced by the hitmaker Jack Antonoff, Mering channelled Linda Ronstadt with a crisp version of “You’re No Good.” She conjured Carole King on “Suddenly,” a groovy, psychedelic homage written by one of her friends from Baltimore, Michael Collins, who has also found indie success in L.A., recording as Drugdealer. That track has become one of Mering’s biggest hits on Spotify, with thirty-two million plays. (Her top song as Weyes Blood, the country-tinged “Andromeda,” from “Titanic Rising,” has received nearly forty million plays.) Collins, remembering their youthful immersion in Baltimore’s experimental milieu, said of Mering, “You know, she could have gone out and tried to have the career she has now from a younger age. But she’s so much more of an odd bird. She was interested in gravitating toward the freak zones.”
Some of the confrontational, theatrical verve of her youth is visible in her more recent videos and album-cover concepts. The drowned-bedroom image on the cover of “Titanic Rising,” for example, could easily have been realized with Photoshop. Instead, she worked with an underwater photographer, holding her breath in the back-yard pool for longer and longer as night fell and the particleboard furniture began to dissolve. In the video for “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”—a title for our times, if ever there was one—Mering scampers around a bombed-out cityscape constructed on the stage of the Ace Theatre, a concert space in downtown L.A. that still looks like the Spanish Gothic movie palace it originally was.
Mering told me she is grateful that she started her career on the margins. It allowed her to try strange stuff and to practice among like-minded friends—not, say, on TikTok or in some other contemporary platform where she would have felt immediate pressure to brand her music and her style. When she made the move toward less transgressive music, she said, “it wasn’t about money—I just wanted to reach people.” With the kind of noise music she had initially been creating, “you could maybe go the art-museum route, or get real academic. I liked people. I wanted to play big shows with people.” She feels that her years spent “doing something that was very ecstatic and free” organically led her to consider other approaches—“to do something that was very orchestrated and planned.”
Mering’s two styles of music-making continue to “feed into each other,” she added. “I now know that, as much as I bang my head against the wall sometimes—it’s gotta be perfect, or it’s gotta be like this, or this melody has to feel like this—at the end of the day the rawest form of emotion is more of an impulse, an improvisatory thing. I learned a lot about improvisation from noise music, and I default to that if I’m overthinking it. You can’t be too self-aware and calculating.”
One of the rewards of a Weyes Blood album is the sense that, beneath the transistor-radio prettiness, something stranger lurks. On the new record, the song “Children of the Empire” pairs a bouncy and captivating melodic line with almost comically grim lyrics: “So much blood on our hands”; “We’re all lost.” Originally, the song had finished on a bright musical note—a fun, vamping outro recorded at EastWest. But Rado told me that, at his studio, he and Mering decided instead to fade out the song with a moody swirl of strings, and to make the finger snaps that punctuate the song sound “colder, louder, more metallic.” These touches, he said, were “so much more Weyes Blood.” So was Mering’s decision to include, on both “Titanic Rising” and “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” an ambient instrumental track that deconstructs an earlier song on the album. On the new record, the instrumental piece is “In Holy Flux,” which takes the vocal loop from “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” and, in Rado’s words, “runs it through a lot of effects to morph it into something sonically different.”
“And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow” contains an especially striking track called “God Turn Me Into a Flower,” which features heavy synths played by the experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin, who performs as Oneohtrix Point Never. Mering’s album notes describe the track as an “other-worldly dirge” that “serves as an allegory for our collective hubris.” Dua Lipa will probably not be coming out with a remix. In a short essay about the album, Mering writes that “the pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel towards an uncertain fate.” The song comes off as a twenty-first-century version of sacred music, with a wash of Disneyesque bird sounds that suggest a tripped-out sublime—or, as Mering puts it, “a musical sob.” In its capacity to both haunt and soothe, the song feels like the album’s definitive moment.
One afternoon last fall, I asked Mering where we should meet for an interview, and she picked Huntington Gardens, in Pasadena. It was a clear-skied day, and we walked among glowing Japanese maples and dying roses. Mering spotted a woman and her young daughter eating ice cream and looked at them longingly. We got in line for some cones. We’d been talking again about her relationship to the past, and she said that she was maybe becoming less nostalgic. “I’ve been using the word ‘sentimental’ more,” she said. “I think I’m sentimental.” She paused. “Because it leaves you open to experiencing the future as something that’s worth remembering. In our culture, it’s so easy to just assume the future is going to keep getting worse.” ♦
