Weyes Blood | And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow

SP1485

18/11/22

Black vinyl

Celestial-influenced folk album ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ is Weyes Blood (aka Natalie Mering)’s follow-up to the acclaimed ‘Titanic Rising’ (which Pitchfork, NPR, and The Guardian admiringly named as one of 2019’s best).

While ‘Titanic Rising’ was an observation of doom to come, ‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ is about being in the thick of it:a search for an escape hatch to liberate us from algorithms and ideological chaos. “We’re in a fully functional shit show,”Mering says. “My heart is a glow stick that’s been cracked, lighting up my chest in an explosion of earnestness.”

‘And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ opens with the wistful, winsome ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’, a song about the interconnectivity of all beings, despite the fraying of society around us. “I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs. Hyper-isolation kept coming up,” Mering says.“Our culture relies less and less on people. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal.”

Other tracks follow in kind. The lullaby-like ‘Grapevine’ chronicles the splintering of a human connection. The otherworldly dirge, ‘God Turn Me Into a Flower’, serves as allegory about our collective hubris. ‘The Worst Is Done’ is an ominous warning, set against a deceivingly breezy pop melody.“Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order,” she says. “These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment.”

Co-produced by Weyes Blood and Jonathan Rado, with engineering by Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief), and additional instrumentation by Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Mary Lattimore.

Tracklisting

It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody
Children of the Empire
Grapevine
God Turn Me Into a Flower
Hearts Aglow
And in the Darkness
Twin Flame
In Holy Flux
The Worst Is Done
A Given Thing