Weyes

The ever-expanding universe of Caroline Polachek‘s Desire, I Want To Turn Into You still hasn’t exhausted its resources. The singer continues mining its contents for fresh material, this time elevating “Butterfly Net” with an exalting appearance from Weyes Blood. The “Butterfly Net” remix will appear on the forthcoming release Desire, I Want To Turn Into You: Everasking Edition, out Feb. 14. A Valentine’s Day gift to her fans, the record will also include Polachek’s recent single “Dang,” which arrived in October.…

Weyes Blood has a way of transforming any old stage into a cathedral. Dressed in a white caped gown and backlit by soft light, she recalls the image of a religious icon. To borrow the words of Flannery O’Connor – whose novel Wise Blood is the origin of Los Angeles singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s moniker – her voice is “Christ-haunted”: serene, yet heavy with experience that belies her years. Her sold-out performance at The Roundhouse has a congregation in silent rapture: scared to move, scared to raise a phone, in case…

Many people will recognise the feeling of gobsmacked powerlessness so often engendered by current affairs. Not for nothing was “permacrisis” declared the word of the year for 2022. US artist Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood, pronounced as Flannery O’Connor would say it, eyes up environmental collapse, the sinister march of tech into human relationships and the lack of love seemingly endemic among humans and responds by throwing all the beauty she can muster back at them.It is a great deal of loveliness. Her…

Many of this year’s albums grapple with the current historical moment. LA experimental auteur Natalie Mering’s fifth outing as Weyes Blood is also “feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change”, according to a letter from Mering that accompanies this release.Fortunately, she transcends the more panicky elements of the herd. Her preternaturally wonderful voice – a 21st-century take on the Laurel Canyon folk-pop idiom of the 1960s – is both an awe-striking thing of beauty and a…

The last time the world heard from singer-songwriter Natalie Mering it was 2019, and Titanic Rising, her fourth album under the name Weyes Blood, was quite rightly being hailed as one of the year’s best. Titanic Rising’s sound was rich and very evocative of early 70s California. Its songs, however, were very much a product of the 21st century, marked by an pervading sense of imminent catastrophe, fuelled by an index of millennial worries that stretched from online dating to late capitalism and environmental collapse.Not…

“This music is so ominous,” says singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, better known as Weyes Blood. The LA-based artist creates sumptuous, sinuous songs that take in everything from technological alienation to the oncoming climate apocalypse. She is not, however, talking about her own music, but about the dour tones blaring from a large screen broadcasting the Queen’s funeral in the room next door.Mering has flown in to promote her latest album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, and we meet in a hotel in east London on the…