The thing about Natalie Mering, a.k.a. Weyes Blood, is that even when she’s writing about the slow-motion apocalypse of our species, she still sounds like she believes we might be okay—if only for the duration of a perfect album side.
Titanic Rising, her breakout record, is a lush, orchestral, existential slow dance with the end times, all filtered through analog dreams and AM gold. It opens like a gentle hallucination and ends with a psychedelic free fall. In between, it gives you heartbreak, climate anxiety, romantic idealism, and the kind of spiritual yearning that would make Brian Wilson sweat.
But according to Mering, it’s still hopeful. “I don’t want anybody to be too disillusioned to not do anything,” she says. “It’s about creating conceptual art around these things because I think people need to mythologize what’s happening. Otherwise it’s just chaos.”
She’s not kidding about mythologizing either. For the album artwork, she built a bedroom and submerged it in water—literally. “It was intense,” she says, recalling the rush to shoot before furniture started to disintegrate. “We had like a couple hours. Water doubles the danger, the weight, the pressure—everything.”
But if the image evokes disaster, that wasn’t the point. “I didn’t want it to look like I was drowning,” she explains. “It’s not trauma porn. It’s about being alive in the middle of it all.”
That’s the mission of Titanic Rising: to meet collapse with grace, to stay poetic while the walls melt. “Wild Time” muses on overpopulation and industrial chaos. “Something to Believe” faces existential panic with baroque defiance. And then there’s “Everyday,” a retro bop that smuggles in a philosophy: “True love is making a comeback.”
Is that line generational wish fulfillment? “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe we’ve been sold a lot of individualism and capitalism dressed up as romance. But I think people miss the idealism of love. There’s a hunger for it.”
She also offers a theory that movies have rewired our brains, especially for those of us raised on VHS and rom-coms. “Movies have a strange impact on people that we haven’t fully comprehended,” she says. “We’re the most cinematically saturated generation. We think in movie scenes.”
Naturally, there’s a track called “Movies.” And it pairs perfectly with the record’s other motifs: adolescent bedrooms, slow-sinking futures, and the aching sweetness of belief. “It’s where we form our ideas about the world,” she says of those suburban sanctuaries. “However disillusioned or backwards they might be.”
The themes are weighty—climate collapse, emotional alienation, cultural saturation—but Mering approaches them like a prog-pop prophet in a thrift-store cape. She wants you to feel the doom, but she wants you to sing along, too.
“The whole thing is kind of an exercise,” she says. “I wanted to talk about these things, but make it feel like poetry. Because that’s how we hold on.”
Turns out, that’s the trick to surviving underwater: don’t panic, don’t flail, just float—and maybe play some harpsichord while you’re at it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
