Exorcising Existentialism: the beauty of Weyes Blood
Many people will have their own candidates for ‘voice of a generation’. They might be in search of someone who touches listeners on a personal level or, equally, someone who has sonically innovated in a way that other artists begin to latch onto. Yet, there are few who truly capture what it’s like to be navigating the bizarre paths that the world lays out for us in the modern age in such a universal way as Weyes Blood does, making her a standout contender for this title.
With five albums under this moniker, Natalie Mering has managed to bottle this feeling of existentialism and tries to make sense of it through the most gorgeous psychedelic folk odysseys imaginable. On the last three albums in particular, this existential anxiety has reared its head most noticeably and earned her countless praise from critics and casual listeners alike.
But why exactly do her angelic hymns of dread seem to resonate so much with listeners across the world? What feelings does she manage to capture that nobody else seems to be able to express in such a succinct way?
It could be traced back as early as her childhood when she was raised in a traditional Christian household in Pennsylvania. There, she began to realise some of the pitfalls of her religious upbringing, which led her to question the morals she was brought up to believe. From that point onwards, she sought out ways to rebel and find answers to this burning confusion.
She didn’t always express this frustration in the elegant manner she’s become known for, however. Mering was previously a member of a string of noise acts before making a solo record as Weyes Bluhd in 2007, which saw her experiment with drones and further avant-garde styles. Her sharp left turn into her current guise in 2011 for her debut album, The Outside Room, was a dramatic one, but the journey she has been on since has produced some of the most arresting and emotionally weighty music of the last decade.
On 2016 album Front Row Seat To Earth, the vision she created for the project truly came into its own and there are a handful of snippets of her existential questioning that come through on tracks such as ‘Generation Why’. This marks her first major song that tackles the confusing nature of millennial despair and despondency, released at a time when the US was facing the prospect of four years under a maniacal president.
It acts as a study on escapism from reality and how her generation is preoccupied with impending crises happening around them through consuming media that constantly reminds us of impending doom. Its chorus plays on the modern-day adage of ‘YOLO’ – ‘you only live once’ – as a motto to live by, but then places further emphasis on the ‘why’ that comes after it, asking a broad question as to the state of the world.
Things got more existential on her follow-up Titanic Rising, with tracks like ‘Andromeda’ musing on how strange it is to live in such a vast world when there’s not a shred of hope within it, and ‘Wild Time’ seemingly grappling with the idea that we’re living in an era that might witness armageddon. The release of this album at the tail end of the last decade resonated with a much wider audience, and her notoriety rose significantly due to the way it expertly captured how many people were feeling at that moment in history.
Mering then went to follow it up with And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow in 2022, an album that she remarked is the second part of an unofficial trilogy. Where Titanic Rising acts as an album that is braced for doom, Hearts Aglow is delivered from the centre of the catastrophe, and many of the songs on the record echo a sense of simultaneous unity and isolation.
‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’ is a reminder to herself that everyone else is going through the same hardships that she is, yet songs like ‘Grapevine’ seem to show everyone becoming more engrossed with technology and not paying attention to one another in the real world, while ‘God Turn Me Into A Flower’ acts as a retelling of the tale of Narcissus and warns us against the perils of self-obsession.
Mering manages to express these worries and anxieties in a way that feels both poetic but easy to understand and virtually applicable to all, and this is one of the primary reasons she is so revered in her field as a unique talent. Goodness knows what the closing chapter of her trilogy will sound like, but there’s more than enough to suggest it will be another work of devastating beauty for us to reckon with.
