Singer Weyes Blood: ‘I’m very typical in fetishising the past. It’s a millennial thing’

To listen to Weyes Blood’s music is to be soothed by lush vocals and ethereal melodies. To listen to her words, however — both in her lyrics and in conversation — is to be confronted with profound anxieties about the modern world.

The American singer-songwriter, whose real name is Natalie Mering, has earned considerable acclaim in recent years for writing enchanting songs about disenchantment. Her 2019 breakthrough album, Titanic Rising, married visions of ecological disaster with reflections on the erosion of personal relationships and social values. During Covid, its images of individuals “stuck inside the wall” seemed prescient.

Her fifth and latest record, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, is both a response to life in lockdown and a broader, plaintive meditation on alienation, narcissism and technocracy. Its sounds are intimate, its resonance universal. The opener is titled “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” and pointedly asks, “Has a time ever been more revealing that the people are hurting?”

The pain of losing or yearning for identity, purpose and human connection runs through the album, which was hailed by many music critics (including the FT’s) as one of 2022’s best. As the title suggests, there are moments in which warmth and light pierce through the gloom, but hope is often ephemeral. One line starts “They say the worst is done” before continuing: “but I think it’s only just begun.”

When we speak via Zoom, I ask the 34-year-old Californian what fuels this malaise. “The worst is done in terms of lockdown but [there’s a] dystopian flavour in everybody’s mouth that keeps getting more intense,” she says. “Everybody seems lost, and the ethos they might’ve had has gotten washed away by this feeling they have to be more presentable or a version of themselves that’s been hijacked by the anti-culture of the internet.” 

The pervasiveness of technology, the abdication of principles, lifestyle aspirationalism and “capitalist mumbo-jumbo” could be seen as the four horsemen of what Mering calls her “loosely apocalyptic” music. While she reassures me that she doesn’t think the end of the world is actually nigh, she voices concerns about how our fixation with self-help and pushing new high-tech frontiers is occluding “societal healing and the questioning of structures”.

This acute sense of the world’s problems first emerged when she was 12. “At the end of the 1990s it was obvious something had died. I noticed that culture took a dip. I realised early on that we were all driving SUVs and that we had warm winters that felt ominous and strange.”

I ask whether being a precocious prophet of doom, a Hardyesque Little Mother Time, made it hard to fit in in Scotts Valley, California. “I became punk and questioned authority,” she says. “But it put me in a weird spot generationally. To this day, when I hang out with people my age I feel disproportionately like a Gen Xer.”

But given that she says we live in “a soup of rehashed nostalgia”, I wonder how she reconciles this cynicism with her own wistfulness for Gen X’s “unspoken code that you weren’t allowed to sell out” and a pre-digital era — as heard in the folksy track “Grapevine”, in which she pines “to go back to the camp with the kerosene lamps”. 

“I do think I’m very typical in fetishising the past. It’s a very millennial thing. We were children before the smartphone took off, and our crossover into adulthood was particularly extreme because we were dumped into a world that wasn’t what it had been even five years prior,” she explains. “So I am right here with my generation, but I have different values. It’s painful to be surrounded by people who wish they had those values but don’t practise them.”

I put it to her that many would argue that millennials are more engaged with enacting change than previous generations. “I do think we’ve made great strides in terms of awareness with BLM and #MeToo. But I don’t know if the social consciousness has totally fruited into these beautiful communities with peace and kindness. My older friends are more accountable. Nowadays you can be your principles online but you don’t have to embody them.”

That Mering doesn’t feel at ease in her own time may explain why her music is typified by a timelessness — a beguiling mix of Laurel Canyon serenity and futuristic sounds. It’s a far cry from the noise music scene in which she started out. I ask how she transitioned from such cacophonous sounds to being an artist whose crystalline voice has been compared to those of Joni Mitchell and Karen Carpenter.

“At a certain point, experimental music had become such a conformist thing that it felt more radical to write a good, solid song,” she says. “I was never trying to specifically emulate the ‘70s, but I was influenced by the same things they were — folk, classical and Tin Pan Alley. I like [my music] to feel like a time machine to a place in the future which also feels very familiar.”

Mering often teases out such tonal dissonances. Songs that sound oneiric are usually rooted in real-world experiences. Others with melancholy lyrics may be performed in a disarmingly jaunty style, or may have an amusing music video; the one for “It’s Not Just Me”, for instance, sees Mering dance alongside a cartoon smartphone. Humour is also a staple of her live persona. “My songs are kind of sad but I’ll make a lot of jokes during the show to keep it intimate and make sure that it doesn’t seem too pretentious.” 

Looking beyond her current tour of Europe and North America, Mering has already started thinking about her next record. This one, she promises, will be about hope. What, I ask tentatively, is the source of her optimism?

“Culturally we’re so scared to let anything die — everything is so archival. But there’s something so valuable about little deaths and being able to repurpose something . . . The only thing that will come from that is something new.”

Weyes Blood tours the UK and Ireland from February 8 and the US from February 22, weyesblood.com