The Cover Uncovered: Drowning with Weyes Blood’s ‘Titanic Rising’
While her 2016 album Front Row Seat to Earth was arguably the one that put Weyes Blood on the map, her 2019 follow-up, Titanic Rising, truly elevated her to the next level and cemented her status as one of the current generation’s most prodigious talents. Having mutated her sound multiple times throughout her career from noise to drone to psychedelic folk, it was on this duo of releases that she started to show something of a consistent vision—a rebirthing of 1960s and ‘70s Laurel Canyon aesthetics and touchstones.
It’s a truly sublime record that encapsulates themes of destruction, confusion, love and loss. However, despite this seemingly tumultuous palette of emotions, it remains a work of mysterious beauty. It’s still the high point of Natalie Mering’s career under the Weyes Blood moniker, but also significant for how it puts a pin in the 2010s with a perfect depiction of the chaos that had been ensuing across the globe over the course of the decade.
While some of its themes became even more pertinent in the years after its release, Mering would touch upon them again in the album’s quasi-sequel, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, released in 2022. Titanic Rising serves almost as a warning sign for things to come, both in her artistic endeavours and the rapidly spiralling global catastrophes we’re increasingly finding ourselves in. While the 2020s would begin with us becoming more isolated and having in our quest for solace, Mering was already channelling this feeling.
For the cover of Titanic Rising, Mering wanted to create an album that evoked being underwater to simulate the feeling of listless floating that is felt in the musical aspects of the album, and of drowning under the immense pressure of being part of modern society. In addition to this, the idea that she wanted to depict herself in a safe sanctuary where she supposedly felt protected from these external pressures is also a major theme that she wished to explore.
She combined these two themes by creating a set that vaguely represented her teenage bedroom and then submerging it in a swimming pool. Mering would then dive below the surface and pose for however many shots she could hold her breath for at a time, and the resulting scene of her sinking to the floor of her aquatic bedroom is what adorns the cover of her album.
In an interview with Stereogum, Mering expanded on these ideas of how the bedroom was an “altar” within Western society. “The bedroom is an archetype,” she told the publication. “To me, it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture, where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies, because we don’t really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.”
While she also touched on how the water was representative of the subconscious and her sinking deeper into it, surrounding herself with the things that provide her with joy in this terrifying world (represented by the posters on the walls of the room), it is also a perfect representation of the surreal state that many of us found ourselves in and having to reflect upon after a dread-filled decade. Mering has hinted that she will conclude a trilogy that began with Titanic Rising with her next release, and while things have arguably gotten worse in the years since the first chapter’s release, perhaps she’ll be able to offer some hope; perhaps with her reaching a summit on the cover.
