Marissa Nadler

Nadler lays the listener — and herself — on the line with July, her sixth full-length album in nearly a decade; it floats freely in the pop cosmos somewhere between gauzy shoegaze, unvarnished folk, and even a hint of metal’s doom-and-gloom spirit. “Drive” opens the record with one of her most devastating lines, addressing a quandary we have all grappled with at some point: “If you ain’t made it now / You’re never gonna make it.” There is catharsis in the chorus: “Nothin’ like the way it feels / To drive,” she sings amid a choir of celestial harmonies, elongating that last word as if it were a car bounding down a long stretch of lost highway. It’s Nadler at her most elemental: warm but spectral, vulnerable but resilient.

Recorded at Seattle’s Avast Studio, the album pairs Nadler for the first time with producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Wolves in the Throne Room). Dunn matches Nadler’s darkness by creating a multi-colored sonic palette that infuses new dimensions into her songs. Eyvind Kang’s strings, Steve Moore’s synths, and Phil Wandscher’s guitar lines escalate the whole affair to a panoramic level of beautiful, eerie wonder.

marissa nadlerfolkdream pop