Here's a funny hypothesis for you: what if you could travel back to the late ‘60s or early ‘70s and hand someone like Jim Morrison or Karen Carpenter a Weyes Blood record? Would they be able to distinguish-just by listening to the songs-that this individual is actually from the 21st century? Will the millennial slogan YOLO—sung with unflinching gravitas on “Generation Why” (from her 2016 album, Front Row Seat to Earth)—be interpreted as a mere vowel? Or even grasp that the phone in question isn't a dusty landline, but a pint-sized computer you can stuff in your back pocket?
In theory, would the self-possessed fatalism of the lyrics—“I can fly and spend all my seeonds/Like they're my last/It's not the past that scares me”—be contextualized by hippie enclaves as just another rejection of mainstream conformism? Instead of, well, a tranquil resignation of the end days? The fact that we can't entirely say for certain about all these things speaks volumes on the timeless quality of Weyes Blood's songs, which stand aloft like empyrean statues amidst the urban sprawl.
Natalie Mering, as she's known in her day-to-day life, has steadily risen within the pop circuits as one of today's most critically acclaimed auteurs. Fearless in her pursuit to express the most universal of subject matter, Weyes Blood always keeps the pulse of humanity's complicated place in the universe with a savant's wisdom and a beat poet's mischief. Let's face it: if one contemporary artist is capable of finishing the pipeline between Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom and ABBA's Arrival, then Mering would be the unanimous choice.
As you can imagine, if Weyes Blood writes a breakup record, it is bound to become unlike any other breakup record ever written. According to Mering, fifth album is the second of a “special trilogy,” one that started with the acclaimed 2019 breakthrough, . If taught us anything, it's that the second of three is supposed to be the ultimate downer of the lot. And to be fair, the cards were laid out for it to become just that. Among other things, there was a pandemic that short-circuited 's attempt to Trojan Horse climate change-induced disaster into Weyes
