Weyes Blood’s “Hearts Aglow” Is The Warm Embrace Before It All Ends

It moves mountains with a gentle caress. It’s Mering at her finest.

In a statement this year, Natalie Mering acknowledged the cruel manner in which 2019’s Titanic Rising had, in the years since its release, transfigured from an “observation of things to come” to an observation of things that became. How feelings of isolation, doom, and abrupt change were violently validated as “once in a lifetime” events transpired consecutively, stopping for no one.

It’s why, on the iridescent follow up In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, she chooses to make plentiful a remedy seen sparingly on her previous album — hope. On the semi-eponymous Hearts Aglow, nested in the center of the album, Mering brings this hope to light in full force. It flows with a post-apocalyptic “swaying in the bar” haze, soaked generously in the kind of subliminal glisten that lights up even the darkest of corners.

It’s the sugar that allows for the swallowing of a bitter pill. “The whole world is crumbling” she sings, embodying the candor of a dear friend who can’t bear to hide the truth from you anymore, but that “in the darkness, I can guide you”. It’s a ballad for the collective — “We don’t know where we’re going”; “We don’t know where our love has gone”.

On Titanic Rising, Mering melded her personal struggles with those of the world around her, in the hopes that her frankness may lighten the yolk of those who feel the same way. On Hearts Aglow, she makes that subtext the text. She stitches both her and our tribulations into the fabric of this messy, rapidly degrading planet. It’s a vivid tapestry that strives, in its bluntness and majesty, to help both its creator and its viewers to move past shared hurts towards something better — glowing hearts in hand as flashlights.

It’s not a promise of better times to come, necessarily, but of peace. Both in knowing that this slump isn’t insurmountable, and that you aren’t alone in overcoming it.