Weyes Blood

“It’s a wild time to be alive,” sang Natalie Mering, who has made records as Weyes Blood for nearly two decades, near the end of Titanic Rising, her tremendous 2019 breakthrough. The words came slowly, broken over enormous drums and refulgent strings, emphasizing the sentiment like an enormous highlighter. Indeed, Mering famously uses the sounds of the past—namely, the sepia-toned music of the nevertheless troubled times of Laurel Canyon folk-rock and the grand pop orchestrators that preceded them—to address our current crises, to contemplate how we keep going as people on a planet so troubled. Titanic Rising, for instance, considered environmental calamity and the way it can empty all of us, corroding any semblance of innocence. On 2022’s And in The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, written amid the pandemic, she considered the crushing weight of isolation, how that global catastrophe underlined our loneliness. “They say the worst is done/But I think it’s only just begun,” she sang. “I hear it from everyone/We’re all so cracked after that.”

Around the time she released Darkness, Mering suggested that the next album might offer some resolution, at least barring another disaster. But in January 2025, the day after she returned home to Los Angeles after working on songs abroad, her home was swallowed by wildfire. She bounced from Big Sur to New York, where she’d lived long ago, and eventually back to Los Angeles. During her stint in New York, she began working at Electric Lady, spending seven-hour stretches in the sunless bunker of Studio B, collaborating with a small crew on the next Weyes Blood album. “I’ve changed so much,” she told Rolling Stone of the songs in process. “The amount of grief, from witnessing everything that’s happening, can feel insurmountable. I think it just took me a minute to reorient the purpose of it all and get back in touch with my roots.”