Weyes Blood

Natalie Mering began her artistic path under the Weyes Blood moniker by moving away from early sonic experiments toward more conventional forms, all while retaining an unsettling atmospheric tension. Emerging from underground noise scenes, she gradually stripped away dense layers of distortion, allowing her compositions to settle into folk and soft-rock territory across meticulously crafted releases such as 2019’s Titanic Rising and 2022’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow.

Mering first honed her skills as a multi-instrumentalist within experimental and noise-rock circles, spending time on bass in Portland’s Jackie-O Motherfucker before launching solo work around 2006. Initial output under the spelling Weyes Bluhd appeared on small-run cassettes that showcased her brooding folk material laced with electronic noise. Those early projects led to multiple tours, among them a European run alongside Brooklyn’s Axolotl. After relocating to Philadelphia she continued refining her approach, occasionally performing under the Wiseblood name or with a shifting group she called the Dark Juices. One lineup of that ensemble recorded her breakthrough full-length, the 2011 Not Not Fun Records release The Outside Room, credited to Weyes Blood & the Dark Juices.

She contributed guest vocals to Ariel Pink’s 2012 album Mature Themes and joined him on tour. Frequent moves took her to rural Kentucky, where she studied herbalism, followed by stretches in New Mexico and Baltimore before she settled in New York City in 2012. Her next album, the luminous and autumnal The Innocents, arrived on Mexican Summer in 2014. The Cardamom Times EP followed in 2015. In 2016 she and Chris Cohen co-produced the widely praised Mexican Summer album Front Row Seat to Earth. Early the next year Mexican Summer issued the 12-inch Myths 002, a collaboration between Weyes Blood and Ariel Pink.

January 2019 brought the lead single “Andromeda” from her fourth album, Titanic Rising, which Sub Pop released that April to strong critical response. An extended tour cycle yielded the Rough Trade Sessions EP, featuring stripped-down versions of four tracks from the record, before the year ended. In 2020 Mering supplied lead vocals for “Oh How We Drift Away” on Tim Heidecker’s Fear of Death. The following year she joined Lana Del Rey and Zella Day on a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free,” which closed Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. November 2022 saw the arrival of Weyes Blood’s fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, which featured contributions from Meg Duffy, harpist Mary Lattimore, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin.