Marissa Nadler shows immense talent through her self-produced album.
New Radiations is Marissa Nadler’s 10th full-length album. Listening to the lyrics is essential to feel everything Nadler is so elegantly trying to say. It is gentle and sad.
Not holding anything back, Nadler twists heart strings right off the dome with “It Hits Harder.” Instrumentally soft and lyrically cunning, Nadler sings for listeners to decode her words. “I will fly around the world just to forget you / Everything dies / But when it rains it’s hard to believe your eyes.”
Nadler leans into a haunted soundscape, erasing the world surrounding “Smoke Screen Selene.” Holding a steady, deep low guitar strum, as Milky Burgess and Randall Dunn create the vibes with synthesizers. This song is repetitive, but it seems to be holding this song in her hand as she gets her point across.
“Weightless Above The Water” is compacted with beautiful imagery. “The sky took its hat off, this spaceship became my home / I saw the horizon the sun would rise it all turned black.” Nadler is expressing the fulfillment of not listening to fear and physically going to outer space away from doubt.
The most notable theme of this album is outer space and all of the beautiful things it contains; she is truly showing appreciation for all things in the sky. Nadler is relating her relationship to what spoke to her.
Closing out the album, “Sad Satellite” is the realization of how Nadler lost herself in a relationship. This song builds more than the rest, emphasizing the heartbreak – “Took me for a ride when I mistook you for the sky.”
The production of New Radiations is exactly what it needs to be. Marissa Nadler does not stray from the overall theme to prove a point; she remains consistent and true to her sound.
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