"And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow": Weyes Blood's new release

    Hair flowing, heart glowing, wrapped in an old white wedding dress once worn as a Halloween costume, Natalie Mering seems to be hitting the religious imagery hard on her latest album’s artwork. It initially makes sense - especially when the record opens with It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody, a blast of heavenly empathy that glides in on lustrous harps and pearly choral swells. "Has a time ever been more revealing/That the people are hurt­ing?” Mering sings, envisaging the pandemic as a giant global blacklight, illuminating all the hidden misery anti grid humans carry with them, “Yes, we all bleed the same way”.

    Following 2019’s superb Titanic Rising, a record that edged its inevitable late-twenties angst with glimpses of climate change, decay­ing late capitalism and “the end of monoga­my”, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow has been conceived as the second part of a trilogy, a bulletin from the eye of the post-pandemic storm. She states her position with surprising baldness. "I should’ve stayed/With my fam­ily", she sings on the pessimistic The Worst Is Done, “I shouldn't have stayed/In my little place/In the world’s loneliest city". 

    On Hearts Aglow, she admits: “I’ve been without friends/ I’ve just been working for years/And I stopped having fun." Underneath the blissful vintage pop instrumentation, these songs vibrate with anxiety, with loneliness, with the fear of having no direction. 

    It could easily become overwrought, yet while Mering’s music is often lavishly beautiful, it is never ingratiating. Even at its most desperate, there is often a slight distance, a peripheral chill. That's partly down to her inscrutably lovely voice, almost deadpan in its purity — the uncanny clarity of Carpenter or Judee Sill. 

For all the music’s grandeur, though, these songs often come down to simple things: work-life balance, home, love hiding or disappeared. Grapevine, which starts as an acoustic road trip before going off-grid in a tubular bell-induced rapture, cruises past Del Rey-like signifiers of doomed California romance: highways, ghost towns, the intersection where “they got James Dean”. At its heart, though, is just another missed connection, Mering wondering if a former lover is driving past her on the interstate’s opposite lane, another ship, another night.

There’s a sense with Mering's music that if things are ­going to be unpleasant, emotions are going to hurt, then they at least need to be properly curated, surrounded by high drama, designed to be beautiful. "Sitting at this party/Wondering if anyone knows me/ Really sees who I am”, she sings as the album opens, “Oh it’s been so long since I felt really known." She needn't worry.

    Here, Mering has built a monument to all those small, lonely, cold emotions, making sure they can be seen from space. It might not be interplanetary—it’s too firmly rooted in the earthly, the human, for that - but And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow again shows Mering’s most extraordinary craft.