Weyes Blood — millennial soothsayer for the end of times

In 2019, after stretches in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and New York, Mering returned to her native California to release her most commercially successful album to date, Titanic Rising. The first of a trilogy, it foretells catastrophe. “I could feel that shit was about to hit the fan,” the musician recalls, “It was a fever pitch moment. The pandemic made that very obvious, but before, it was still up for debate.” In it, Mering seems to sing from the waterlogged 90s bedroom of her album cover; she laments the rising tides, wildfires, felled trees, longs for the innocence of childhood, and despairs over technology’s impact on human connection. It is purposefully on the nose. On ‘Wild Time’ where she sings about how “everyone’s broken now”, the song starts and ends with arrangements from ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee,’ the hymn the band on the Titanic reportedly performed as it sank. Mering, a movie buff, is a huge fan of the 1997 film — but still, it is an apt metaphor: down with the ship we go. 

That vacuum was filled by music. At 13, Mering scored a job at a local record shop, and would spend evenings sneaking out to Philadelphia to attend gigs — sometimes arriving so early and looking so young that she wouldn’t have to pay entry. There was a stint at college to study music, before she decided to drop out to dive headfirst into Philly’s underground scene: “I treated going to shows in basements like I was going to church. It was very Pentecostal in its own way.” Sonically, the music was a 180 to the Weyes Blood of today. She would play in noise bands like Satanized and Jackie-O Motherfucker, where she would douse herself in fake blood and mashed fruit to make it look like her guts were exploding; or pop fake green breast implants. In other words, it was all very punk. 

What does that term mean to her today? When we speak, Mering has been operating as Weyes Blood for 20 years, and in that time released three (commercially unsuccessful but critically lauded albums) before Titanic Rising, and 2023’s And in The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. She’s opened for the likes of Lana Del Rey and Kacey Musgraves, as well as played shows at Coachella and Glastonbury. “Well, interestingly,” she deliberates, “I felt like it was still alternative back then to be badass and punk. At a certain point, that vibe became weirdly mainstream, a lot of the big pop stars use demonic imagery. It’s just become passe. If you want to be avant garde and cutting edge, then writing beautiful classic songs is the future. Spectacle is a hard, nuanced thing to nail nowadays.”

But the punk scene in 2008? Intense, not always pretty, and ultimately, unsustainable post the financial crash. “I was at the turning point of generations. People that were just five or ten years older than me had a much easier time being an artist,” she tells me. “Rents were cheaper, there weren’t as many monthly expenses, and there was a built-in safety net for Gen Xers — they were dumped into the most beautiful economy of anybody. Everything became a lot more expensive. I had this idea that I was going to be an underground musician, playing shows, selling tapes, working a minimum wage job, and somehow paying rent and health insurance. After two or three years, it became impossible. I saw which of my friends had connections or rich parents, and what that can do for you. It was a deep education in the fact that the world doesn’t owe you anything.” Mering struggled to hold down waitressing jobs because she didn’t look “really shiny and gorgeous”, and once, was fired as a nanny for just having one pair of shoes. 

This is the second time I’m chatting with Mering. Both times are off camera, so it’s hard to get a full read; but she comes across as polite, sometimes distracted, but completely discerning (if she doesn’t want to answer a question, she will just reply with a long “Definitely”). You can sense a tiredness too — it’s as if she’s spoken about the admittedly heavy themes of her music one too many times.

In 2022, she released And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow — an existential record about the human condition, with tracks that sound more like self-contained hymns. If Titanic Rising foretold calamity, then the sophomore effort in the trilogy was written from the veritable eye of the storm. But while reflecting on the previous album and the pandemic, Mering also offers us a way to navigate this strange and turbulent time: connection. “I think the gist of what I was trying to say is that we’ve become so isolated in our cellular worlds that it is very difficult to lean on one another,” she replies, after I reference the music video to ‘It’s Not Me, It’s Everybody’, where she is literally chased by a giant, animated cell phone. “I think a lot of people don’t know the difference between setting boundaries and subscribing to this idea that we should all be completely independent. The whole record was thinking about how we are going to get together in the face of this growing isolationism.”

If you read anything about Weyes Blood’s live performances, the sense of community is tangible. On Reddit, couples talk about crying at her gigs, and having “transcendental” experiences. The crowd has become more diverse as she’s gained commercial success too, evolving from middle-aged dads, and bonafide indie kids, to Lana Del Rey fans. On her year-long tour, In Holy Flux, Mering would project images of togetherness on the screens as she performed underneath — floating high priestess-like in flowing white dresses and capes, as her fans chucked DVDs at her feet. It’s become a thing, she laughs, telling me that she’s been archiving them in her time off, and has found new favourites like Divorce, Italian Style and John Cassavetes’ Love Streams.