“Destroy what I create”: What will be next for Weyes Blood?
Her artist biography simply reads “emotional cowboy”. Her name derives from Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 debut novel, Wise Blood, assembled from a collection of stories that tackle religious themes. Impossible to mould and increasingly zealous, Weyes Blood has shown a capacity for the contemplative and the spiritual in her unrivalled work.
This is mirrored in her upbringing: raised in a born-again Pentecostal Christian family, Natalie Mering’s early childhood had a deeply religious tone. Still, music was absolutely in her blood, as well: her father, Sumner, is a musician and guitarist who, in the late 1970s, played in the Los Angeles scene with the new wave band, Sumner. Cycling through variations of the spelling before landing on Weyes Blood, Mering adopted her name at 15, an early glimpse of her penchant for reinvention.
The year 2011 saw Mering’s official debut as Weyes Blood, after touring with the Portland-based band Jackie-O Motherfucker as their bassist and singing with the noise rock band Satanized. Her six-song debut, The Outside Room, has tinges of her noise rock roots matched by haunting drones, both sonic and vocal. Its successor, 2014’s The Innocents, was grounded in the all-too-familiar goddamn sentiment of a first love lost.
It continues the sonic vision of her debut, meditative folk with a raw edge acquired from the experimental, and The Innocents’ story becomes intensely melancholic, yet spiritual. In the release’s aftermath, Mering uprooted herself, both sonically and literally. She moved from New York to Los Angeles with little semblance of what was to come. “I was in New York alone,” she said, in conversation with Urban Outfitters. “No friends, no money, no record deal at the time. Literally, I had nothing.”
Mering had long been acquainted with despair, reflected in her most poignant songs that perpetually resonate with feelings of isolation. She channels her highest energy through songs extracted from the lowest ranks of emotion, tackling her routine questioning of anxieties, fears and purpose. Where her previous albums existed sonically between classic and contemporary, her third, 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, is her most distinctly 1970s-infused. The collection amplifies her distinct folk-psychedelia merger, but with a baroque-pop flair that adds a stunningly dramatic tone. If Front Row Seat to Earth was rooted in the isolation she felt in New York, its result is a breakthrough from her confines into expansive, all-encompassing territory.
Her mind’s imposition continued on Titanic Rising, a reverberation of existential thought trapped under the sensation of water. In a gorgeous example of sonic and visual synergy, the album’s accompanying visuals were shot by photographer Brett Stanley, who fashioned a teenage bedroom underwater. With walls covered in posters, including her father and Lou Reed, and an assortment of talismans covering the furniture and floors, Mering’s return to adolescence was a nod to the “subconscious altar,” as she tells Stereogum, of a bedroom in Western culture.
“I’m not drowning in it. I’m alive,” Mering explains, of being submerged in water. “I think it’s supposed to be symbolic of the subconscious. If the water represented the subconscious, that bedroom lives in that subconscious space… Seeing your bedroom as a sacred altar is pretty surreal because most of the time it’s not seen as such, but I think so many people formulate their ideas about reality in that space. It’s all supposed to represent modern individualism.”
Enveloped in the dreamscape of her own creation, Mering’s usual approach to songwriting faltered in Titanic Rising’s wake. “My first impulse is always to destroy what I create,” Mering revealed. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, the next record’s going to be an experimental noise album. I’m going to do my Mering Machine Music.'”
To liken her eventual follow-up to the ill-fated Reed record feels like a kiss of death, but it was an apt comparison: both come from a desire to subvert expectations and remain steadfast in their approach, knowing that the work will find those it is meant for. With Titanic Rising’s ripple effects came 2022’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, channelling a similar spirit with a sharper lens towards her resonance with the world, at large, finding solace in knowing that everyone goes through similar hardships and turmoil.
With various collaborations with Lana Del Rey, Caroline Polachek and Drugdealer, Mering’s evolution is a constant guarantee, though she begs the question of what is to come next. As she’s shown across her discography, her steady growth into her spiritual, ambitious interpretation of pop is unpredictable, yet continually exciting. One thing that can surely be guaranteed is a slow, eventual return to herself, however heavy that nostalgia may feel.
