New Radiations

Released in 2021, The Path of the Clouds marked a culmination in the gradual expansion of Marissa Nadlers Gothic folk sound across 17 years, one that saw the onetime acoustic artist leaning into distorted electric guitar and synthesizer atmospheres with collaborators like Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins, Lost Horizons) and Jesse Chandler (Mercury Rev, Midlake). Her tenth album, New Radiations, finds her stripping that sound back down to something more simplified while achieving a similarly haunting astro-folk. At the same time, her memorable narratives remain the stuff of heartbreak, tragedy, history, and lore, as evidenced by song titles like "Hatchet Man," "Smoke Screen Selene," and "Bad Dreams Summertime." She recorded the self-produced album at a studio in Nashville and at home, with Milky Burgess as the only other performer to appear throughout the track list. He was also credited with arrangements that still employ electric guitar and synthesizers but rely more heavily on acoustic elements as well as vocals that often seem multi-tracked into parallel realms of existence. Notably, New Radiations was mixed by Randall Dunn, whose experimental inclinations include recordings with the likes of Sunn O))), Oneohtrix Point Never, and Anna von Hausswolff, among many others. The song "Light Years" features conspicuous autoharp alongside all of these other components as well as creepy lyrics like "Back in the day…/When you could still hypnotize her" and "Then you tried to erase all the X-rays you took of her" that are meant to represent a fading love. "Bad Dreams Summertime" is a standout among a truly immersive set, thanks largely to ghostly girl group-type backing vocals, shifting tonal centers, and lyrics that confuse time, imagination, and reality ("False recollections, the wrong soundtrack"). Elsewhere, "Hatchet Man" is indeed a chilling murder ballad ("He thought no one would notice her gone"), "New Radiations" injects the album with some rare heavier psychedelic guitar and spectral synths, and "To Be the Moon King" was inspired by physicist and inventor Robert Hutchings Goddard, dubbed the father of modern rocketry. It includes lines like "It was finally spring when he found a new dimension" amid brittle acoustic guitar and spacey overtones and ambient noise mixed so low as to barely register, like the flickering silent film that the mind conjures to illustrate her story. ~ Marcy Donelson