“I will fly around the world just to forget you” are the opening words of “It Hits Harder,” the first track on New Radiations. The song is about a farewell. The album ends with “Sad Satellite,” where the titular heavenly object is used as a metaphor for distance, when the gap is increasing between the narrator and the subject: the latter a character who is “sucking me dry” and “took me for ride”.
It’s not hard, then, to construe the tenth album from the Nashville-based Marissa Nadler as one permeated with partings – cleavages which create distance. If analysed, detachment can bring perspective and understanding. But Nadler’s lyrics instead seem to be a form of reportage, oblique vignettes setting-up New Radiations as a commentary on disconnection.
From this perspective, with “Weightless Above the Water” she takes the role of Valentina Tereshkova who, in 1963, became the first woman to orbit the earth. “To be the Moon King” is inspired by Robert H Goddard. During the 1910s and 1920s, he developed liquid-fuel rocket propulsion but was not, in his own time, universally acclaimed. In Nadler’s reading, he was “chasing stars” and “found a new dimension”.
Appropriately, the self-produced New Radiations is an ethereal album which – despite being mixed by regular Nadler collaborator and sometimes sonic maximalist Randall Dunn, who has also worked with Earth, Anna von Hausswolff and Sunn O))) – is also very sparse. The main instrument is Nadler’s finger-picked guitar. Her voice is thickly double tracked. There are no drums, no percussion. More skeletal than any of Nadler’s most recent albums, it is stylistically on a line between the music from Twin Peaks and Mazzy Star. Everything is taken at a moderate pace. One track bleeds into the next.
Overall, New Radiations sets its mood and sticks with it. In the wake of its release, Nadler will be playing live. If this represents where she’s at now, appropriate locations might include a crypt, a half-lit grotto or a glade within a shadow-filled forest.
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