46:07 // August 15th, 2025 // Bella Union
Marissa Nadler dropped her excellent new record New Radiations into our greasy, macabre-hawking paws almost exactly one month ago, whereupon it made its mark with a handful of critics, soaked up a modest amount of acclaim, and promptly disappeared from every discussion space I was both privy to and not insistently bringing it up within. What could be the matter? How could such a refined offering from this long-established dark folk maven fail to land? It's easy to blame this muted reception on two counts of awful timing – one for releasing in the height of August despite being the single most autumnal record I've heard this year, another for missing an opportunity for its doom-folk reveries to find a fresh audience with the algorithmised effetes sniffing at the nail varnish of Ethel Cain's latest, which released just one week previously – but at the end of the day, New Radiations is an unflinchingly homogenous affair that demands either quiet patience or a cold shoulder from a first-time listener, with Nadler crooning over one sinuous arpeggiation and haunted current of reverb after another.
This may not be a record where you can leave your attention span at the door, but now that September has laid its gorgeous, wistful gloom over the world, New Radiations has found its natural place and merits a fresh heralding, along with several sober listens to prove its worth. The hardest things to develop a keen eye for are often those placed in plain sight from the start, and Nadler certainly wastes no time in laying down her M.O. of haunting refrains, skeletal folk arpeggiations and distant pangs of overdriven chords. Once established, she sticks to this approach like grease to a caravan sink. Where her recent-ish keynotes For My Crimes (2018) or The Path of the Clouds (2021) offered an olive branch in the form of insistently morbid storytelling or eerie instrumental flourishes, this album dials the drama back and rests its weight on ruthlessly confident songwriting amidst threadbare fingerpicking, peripheral soundscapes and the occasional crackle of overdrive. You're either spellbound by the macabre logic behind Nadler's every vocal harmony or wily chord progression, or you're in for a test of patience.
The subject matter largely corresponds to this spartan brief: the title-track's album-crowning bridge essentially boils down to an enigmatic and then I remembered, while other tracks are built on straightforward portraits of heartbreak. Nadler's trademark vignette narratives do make an appearance (see the crime-voyeur album highlight "Hatchet Man"), but even these find themselves pared back to elliptical outlines on the likes of "Smoke Screen Selene" and "Bad Dreams Summertime".
More than subject matter, her lyrical standpoint proves one of the album's most distinguishing factors: throughout the record, Nadler operates more exclusively from a position of dislocation. At points this is temporal (see "Light Years"' and "You Called Her Camellia"'s past/present disjuncture), but more commonly, she identifies herself with an aerial presence marinating on burdensome emotions a vast distance away from their source, whether it's flying through the skies (yet failing to outrun heartbreak) on "It Hits Harder", as an astral traveller drifting in Earth's orbit on "Weightless Above the Water", or on the album's most explicit charting of emotional labour over distance, the closer "Sad Satellite". The misty-eyed, stargazing perspective she shows in these guises forms the context for "To Be the Moon King", a tribute to pioneering rocketeer Robert H. Goddard that otherwise lands as the closest thing that album has to a showstopper. The earnestness of her delivery as she narrates the man's backyard engineering exploits goes far beyond a tangential curio and suggests a shared hunger, a need to look up at the sky and see that great pale orb as something more than dead.
Nadler's fixation on the beyond, on the resonances of distant emotions in endless space, is a well-complemented by the album's sparse palette, hones in on various qualities she has long since perfected: crooning a quavering echo over languorous feedback, threading haunting affect through the twang of a country-style arpeggio, holding the floor with such a steady, purposeful presence that it matters little if she eschews percussion entirely (and oh boy, does she). Every last second of this record sounds exquisite, each tone perfectly crisp or weightlessly languorous as the occasion demands; credit here goes to Nadler herself, who handles production, recording and engineering duties alongside her multi-instrumentalist collaborator Milky Burgess, but Randall Dunn proves the perfect choice to handle the mixing, showing the weight of his credentials with the likes of Boris, Sunn O))), Anna von Hausswolff and Kayo Dot as he imbues her ethereal atmospheres with unmistakable weight.
Gloomy, portentous and stubbornly refined in its aesthetics, New Radiations wins the day on sheer craft and boasts multiple victory laps' worth of consistency — yes, it's novelty-free outside of its self-evident dreaminess, yes, it's very much the kind of album where one zeroes in on three to four clear highlights and hears the other tracks as complementary echoes of these, but Nadler's songwriting is so meticulously realised, her pacing so lean, and her floor for less essential cuts so high that she sees off with depth and confidence what once scanned as fleeting brilliance in the sound she mined for titillating crime portraits. This is a mature album in every sense of the term.
8.0/10
Further listening:
shoot it down and make it sadder → Emma Ruth Rundle - Engine of Hell
yes yes but spook me again → Chelsea Wolfe - Unknown Rooms
buy it and throw away → all your Lana del Rey albums
gawd she sounds like she'd love some ritualistic country → Wovenhand - Mosaic
i want it to be november actually → Goldfrapp — Tales of Us
does she ever have more instruments? → Marissa Nadler — The Path of the Clouds