Weyes Blood: ‘That I ended up making beautiful, feminine music is a surprise’

“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 day of the funeral, the surrounding streets eerily deserted. The atmosphere in the cafe is strange and sombre, as though we are whispering to each other in the back pews of a church.

It’s an apt setting in which to discuss the work of Weyes Blood, who started making music under the name as a teen, inspired by the Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood. “I think I was attracted to the idea of the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,” she says, “that concept to me was just so mind-blowing, and so relatable, as somebody that was raised really Christian: to want to undo religion but still have the structure, still have that architecture living empty within me. My form of worship became centred on music.” She pauses for a second, then adds in a velvety Californian drawl: “And I was 15. I was like, it sounds cool!”

In the years since, Mering has built a reputation for creating music of an almost otherworldly beauty, melding the swooning melodies of classic songwriters – her idols include Harry Nilsson and Hoagy Carmichael – with very modern sensibilities and preoccupations (on her 2016 song Generation Why, she slowly and majestically sang “Y… O… L… O” – You Only Live Once – as though casting an ancient spell). After a decade in avant-garde noise bands and esoteric solo projects, her 2019 album, Titanic Rising, was a critical and popular breakthrough. The Observer’s Kitty Empire wrote that it is “an album as easy on the ear as it is subtly unsettling… the beauty Weyes Blood offers has its eyes wide open”; the New Yorker described Mering’s voice as “a rich, clear, mellifluous alto that has caused some to call her the ‘millennial Joni Mitchell’”. She has collaborated with artists including Lana Del Rey and Perfume Genius, with whom she shares an affinity for off-kilter baroque pop and a vintage-leaning aesthetic, though her music sounds like little else that is being released.

Today Mering is in black and white, pairing a T-shirt listing Bob Dylan album titles with a sharp two-tone suit; she has flowing dark hair and a face that would not appear out of place on a Greek statue or a Renaissance painting, but by way of a Levi’s advert. There is a stillness about her; you can imagine that in a different time she might have been consulted as an oracle. Perhaps her current role is not far off. She describes Titanic Rising as “an observation, sounding the alarm”; the first track was prophetically titled A Lot’s Gonna Change. Communing with other realms appears to be part of the job; her latest single is a collaboration with another of her idols, John Cale. “He kept trying to make me sing like Nico – it was like a seance. We were summoning the low-voiced lady vibes.”

Born Natalie Laura Mering in Santa Monica, California, she moved several times before her family settled in Pennsylvania when she was 11. Her parents were born-again Pentecostal Christians and Mering was raised in a strictly religious household, although she and her two older brothers went on to discover their own beliefs: “They’re like me – weird party people. My parents say they have free-range children.” It was “more of a new-agey spin on Christianity”, she notes: her parents are both musicians, and her father, Sumner, dated Joni Mitchell and Anjelica Huston in the 70s (you can spot a poster of his band in the underwater bedroom on the Titanic Rising album art).

In school, Mering was “a real outcast – I had really short hair, and would always have my Walkman in the hallway, listening to weird noise tapes. I was very much not like anybody in high school.” She graduated early, didn’t go to prom. “I grew up too fast – I was like a mini adult.” She found her crowd in the closest city, Philadelphia, which had a thriving live music scene: she would take the train and go to “loud experimental shows – really ecstatic and wild”, and punk shows in old Victorian houses, where she would befriend local UArts students. She moved to Portland, Oregon to study music but dropped out after a year, and performed in noise bands Jackie-O Motherfucker and Satanized. “It was definitely rocky. I played some really bad shows, and some really good shows,” she says. “Some of those shows exist online, but I’m really lucky that for the most part, I could just be bad.”

She moved around a lot, eventually ending up in New York, which she describes as “like bootcamp for people – if you don’t have generational wealth, it’s harsh”. While those years were difficult, both financially and psychologically, they were essential for honing her skills. “It took a while to get really good,” she says. She was in choirs growing up, and later had to learn how to resonate when singing through a PA system. “I had to work for many years to get to where I’m at now. I didn’t start out fabulous – that took a lot of practice. I finally learned how to wrangle the beast.” What kept her going was a steadfast belief that music was what she was meant to do, despite the somewhat muted, though critically favourable, reception to her first two albums, The Outside Room in 2011 and The Innocents in 2014.

Things started to come together when Mering moved back to Los Angeles and released her third album, 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, which gained her widespread acclaim; singles such as Seven Words (“I want you mostly in the morning / When my soul is weak from dreaming”) and a scene-stealing verse on Perfume Genius’s Sides marked her out as an expert chronicler of romantic disillusionment and wider existential malaise. Titanic Rising, released by Sub Pop in 2019, cemented her success, with reviews praising its lyrical acuity, rich instrumentation and the soaring beauty of her voice. A number of critics remarked on the disconnect between Mering’s past bands and the unashamed loveliness of her melodies. “It took a level of bravery for me to embrace that side of myself,” she says, “because I’ve always been a little bit edgier, in the way that I think, in the way that I function in life. The fact that I ended up making really beautiful, feminine music is a bit of a surprise. To me, in its own way it’s subversive and brave.”

Titanic Rising’s follow-up, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, was written during the pandemic, which Mering spent in her apartment in LA, cooking food for her dog Luigi (“sweet potatoes with different meats, trace minerals”), calling her friends and watching DVDs from a local rental store (she has recently curated a Freaky Movie Weekend in New York). She read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman and The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch; she contributed a song to Minions: The Rise of Gru, when her friend Jack Antonoff was looking for someone who could sing Linda Ronstadt. Hearts Aglow will be the second album in a trilogy, following Titanic Rising’s “observation of doom to come” with a dissection of what it means to be in the thick of it; the third will be about hope. “I was trying to process this idea of irrevocable change, and what that does to personal relationships, the damage it can do to people, because it’s so isolating.”

At the same time, the album is “a romance novel – there’s a lot of love songs”. On the tender Hearts Aglow, she sings “baby you’re the only one/ Who’ll drive me down to the pier/ Take me up on that ferris wheel”; by the end of the album, the couple is “making ashes of our joy”. “I was in a relationship, and it had a lot of different phases, and it ended,” she says simply. “But I don’t feel bad when things end that are supposed to end – death is a source of life. There’s a lot of life and death on the record.” A recurring image is that of a cracked heart: the cover art shows Mering as an angelic being with a glowing chest, Christ-like. “It’s like a glow stick: you crack it and it glows. It’s about the power of having your heart so broken that it would emanate a light.”

The pandemic also exacerbated our reliance on technology, something Mering has been writing about for a long time. “I think every time you gain something, you lose something. So yes, we’ve gained this inconceivable ability to communicate worldwide and promote yourself, hustle the global market on the most individual scale, but the trade-off is gigantic.” In the video for It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody, Mering dances with an animated mobile phone that feasts on corpses strewn around a film set (loosely based on Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse), the music crescendoing ethereally as things get increasingly gory. But Mering is no luddite: she has a smartphone and uses social media, where she is well versed in left-field internet humour. “Smashing the phones and trying to go back in time is not a solution. You almost have to get in the belly of the beast to understand it more, and do what you can to try to save the kids that are really drowning in it. Millennials and gen Z could both relate to the fact that they are the guinea pigs for these changes, even though they might be in different parts of the spectrum.”

Mering supported Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate in 2020, and is hopeful that a figure such as him or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could become president in our lifetimes. But she is wary of any grand claims about music and art’s power to change things: “I try to be realistic about it. I’ve never had people come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t believe in that until I heard your music.’ Usually they’re like, ‘That’s how I feel too.’ I would love to be able to write a song to save the world, but I’m not converting anybody: it’s preaching to the choir. But the choir needs preaching to.” What she does hope to do is to “shed light on the details of the disillusionment to make more sense of it, versus living in this vague mystery of ‘Something’s not right.’ I like to think of myself as a salve for people that are hurting from those kinds of anxieties.” She is vocal in her support of climate activism, although she notes that “power has become so decentralised it’s really hard for us to tell who to attack – I can imagine it’s going to be a long, weird process where a lot of different things are going to be tried”. In order to effect real change, she says, “we need the billionaires to step up and use their weight, like the CEO of Patagonia just did. Because the political system is pretty damaged.”