Weyes Blood’s fifth studio album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, is strikingly similar to Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century from earlier this year. Besides both bearing loquacious titles, they boast archaic, troubadour-esque crooning and a jaunty, overly self-conscious classical pop style. To her credit, Weyes Blood, neé Natalie Mering, takes a more forward-looking and engaging tack, but only to a marginal degree.
Though And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow frequently harks back to Americana and folk forms, Mering injects the album’s 10 songs with contemporary flourishes. “God Turn Me Into a Flower” beautifully disintegrates into a collage of spinning synth fragments (courtesy of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin), creeping electric violin, and bird chatter. Elsewhere, the swishing, flitting drum machine and low-end guitar notes (both performed by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado) of “Twin Flame” break up the pretty but meandering instrumentation of the album’s back half, which gets perilously close to stultifying, especially on the piano-driven closer “A Given Thing.”
The album’s narrative is rooted in our current moment, tracking a character’s desire to find love while “living in the wake of overwhelming changes.” Mering sometimes approaches this subject matter with acuity and other times with a frustratingly broad brush: After years of tweets and think pieces about the societal impacts of Covid, a lyric like “We’ve all become strangers/Even to ourselves” feels like a glib approximation of modern life.
These (post-)pandemic reflections are at their most incisive on songs like “The Worst Is Done,” in which Mering pump-fakes with deceptively chipper acoustic guitar and almost Christmas carol-esque harmonizing. Then, puncturing the mood, she humorously and incisively sings about how, though we’re seemingly experiencing a collective bit of relief as we emerge from this whole ordeal, we’re actually more fucked than ever.
“Hearts Aglow” serves as the album’s centerpiece, a full-throated, whimsical track that encourages acts of communion—like dancing together in the sand—since “the world is burning.” The song packs a punch as the most fully realized combination of the album’s sometimes disparate threads of survival in the face of mass trauma. Though rose-colored, its sentiments don’t feel cheap because Mering’s buttery vibrato and earnest vocal performance ably convey the necessity of accepting a lack of assurance about the future while embracing temporary comfort.
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