Weyes Blood: ‘I wanted to be an artist but I didn’t have the family money or connections’

Ahead of the release of her much-anticipated fifth album, Natalie Mering speaks to Annabel Nugent about coming to terms with the reality of climate change, her ‘wild’ days performing with a metal band and living in the ‘underbelly of society’

Natalie Mering began performing as Weyes Blood as a teenager (Neelam Khan Vela)

Back when Natalie Mering was a teenager and Blockbuster still existed, she was in the store choosing a DVD with her uncle. “He was a real tough guy,” recalls the singer-songwriter. Mering was opposed to renting anything apocalypse-themed; she had just seen An Inconvenient Truth and the last thing she wanted to watch was a Michael Bay disaster flick. Her uncle teased her over this childish blindness to the changing world. Ever since, Mering has faced her apocalyptic sorrows head-on, rendering the end of days in stirring, shimmering songs released under the moniker, Weyes Blood. “I thought, ‘Damn, he has a point.’”

Mering, 34, is known for making music about this world that sounds like it comes from another. Since her 2011 debut, she has crafted songs that slide between chamber pop, late Sixties folk, Seventies AM radio, off-kilter rock and classical, with vocals that lean closer to Baroque opera than modern pop. The result, everyone agrees, is ethereal – a descriptor that pops up in every review without fail. But even in her early material, something lurks in the mist, more eerie than the dulcet fingerpicking suggests. Titanic Rising (2019) cleared the haze and revealed the existential angst of its centre. On the album, she tackled a clutch of contemporary themes, namely the climate crisis. Her previous albums had built a world. Now, Mering was setting it alight and flooding it with water. (For the album cover, Mering submerged a recreation of her childhood bedroom in a swimming pool. Teddy bear and all.) The record was critically acclaimed and landed Mering on many best albums of the year lists. Collaborations with Perfume Genius and Lana Del Rey followed.

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow will be released this week. It is her fifth record and the second in a trilogy of which Titanic Rising was the first. If its precursor was the siren, this one is the dirge. “The alarm has been on full blast for a while now and there’s no disagreement anymore; everybody knows the climate is changing,” she tells me over a steamy cup of English breakfast tea. In a few hours, she’ll be on the Eurostar to Paris before she heads back across the pond. Mering used to have fans who didn’t believe in climate change, a strange concept for a musician so concerned with it. She assures me those fans have since come to their senses. “The Christians, the conservatives, everybody knows," she says. “Those last few pangs of pretending were short-lived.”

Mering’s speaking voice is low like her singing one. She is pale with straight brown hair that falls heavy on either side of her face. The tips of her ears peek through like tiny glaciers interrupting a stream. People often comment on her elvish looks, but as easy as it is to imagine Mering stepping off the pages of a Tolkien novel, so, too, you can picture her on stage in a sweaty basement club, hair clinging to her face and fake blood gushing from her chest. But more on that later.

Coming to terms with the reality of our climate crisis has felt a bit like a break-up for Mering. “It’s like getting your heart broken when you realise that what you had anticipated for your future is very obviously not going to happen. It’s like, the jig is up.” At the time Mering was writing the record, she was, in fact, dealing with an actual break-up. She was also in lockdown like the rest of us. “I was alone and functioning within a more internal headspace.” The result is her most candid music yet. “It’s hard to be vulnerable like that; people might know that a song is about them. It’s embarrassing.” Mering knows that it’s cooler to be shocking or ironic these days. “But I don’t want to be cool anymore,” she beams. The silken and heady track “Grapevine” is a break-up song but in Mering’s hands, it becomes a rumination on Earth, too. “California’s my body/ And your fire runs over me,” her voice calls out, as if across the empty stretch of road that the song is named after.

If Mering sounds pessimistic, she doesn’t mean to. In fact, she already knows her trilogy will end on a hopeful note. There has always been a comfort to Mering’s music. Even when she sings about themes of collapse and technological malaise, her warm alto soothes like the feeling of someone running their nails down the small of your back. Her music, to borrow a therapy term, makes you feel held. “If there’s a really bad situation, you’re supposed to go limp, and I know that sounds weak but it’s not. It’s really hard and I don’t think it necessarily means giving up.” She paraphrases a quote from Adrian Lyne’s 1990 psychological horror Jacob’s Ladder. “It’s something like, ‘Hell is when you can’t let go of your life; heaven is when you choose to let go.’ There’s something very Buddhist about that.”

Mering was born in Santa Monica but moved around until her family settled in Pennsylvania when she was 11. “It was a weird, funky, new wave vibe in my house.” Her parents were musicians and born-again Christians (Mering is no longer religious but still holds a “small interior space” for spirituality). The stereo played a heavy rotation of Stevie Wonder, Tower of Power, Tupac, Dr Dre, and Joni Mitchell. Her father, Sumner Mering of the band Sumner, had dated Mitchell – and Anjelica Huston – in the Seventies. Mering sang in choirs and played piano and guitar. At 13, she got a job in a record store and began seeking out “weird” music. “I became a bit of a completist. I just wanted to know everything about everything.” Today, Mering has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and culture, which she deploys in conversation easily. It was around that time that she discovered Broadcast’s 1997 album Work and Non Work on eBay. “I bought that CD, and the rest is history. As soon as I heard Broadcast, I realised that it was OK to make freaky, weird, nostalgic music that is perfectly relevant.” Radiohead elicited a similar awakening.

Mering has always been a happy outcast. “My high school was full of post-rock jocks that took a lot of Oxycontin.” Her interests and those of her peers seemed to exist in two separate circles of a Venn diagram. “I remember feeling so cheated when I finally became a teenager, and the popular music was Britney Spears and NSYNC. I was like, ‘Damn it!’” She pounds her fist on the table theatrically. “I was always really alternative. That seemed cooler at times than it did at others.” But eventually, she found her crowd in the city. “I would take the train to Philadelphia where I met people who made it really obvious to me that I was cool.” She says it with a self-mocking drawl so it comes out like kewl. It was in Philadelphia that she discovered the avant-garde noise music churning out from dank basement clubs. After a brief stint studying music at college, she dropped out and started partaking in that scene herself.

Natalie Mering gained critical acclaim with her 2016 record ‘Front Row Seat to Earth’ (Neil Krug)

Leaving college was an easy enough decision. “I realised right away that it was going to be too expensive, and I didn’t want to have all that debt,” she explains. On reflection, Mering thinks she probably could have stuck it out a little longer. “ I could have done four years of college and still been a sprout but at that time, I thought I needed to have figured everything out before I was 22. If I had known I wasn’t going to figure it out till I was 28 then I totally could have just ripped through some school and been a little more edumacated,” she smiles.

The years that unfolded in lieu of college were “wild”. She performed in the noise bands Satanized and Jackie-O Motherf***er, going on a European tour with the latter. The performances were crazy. Mering would mix mashed bananas and fake blood in a plastic bag that she’d rip open on stage to make it look like her guts were exploding from her chest. Other times, she wore lime green breast implants that she popped in front of the crowd. She recalls all of this with a wistful nostalgia. “With smartphones now, you can’t do that kind of thing. Back then, nobody had to be hot; nobody had to be cool. It was just the nerdiest people having the best time of their lives.”

Back then, Mering was living an artist’s life on the East Coast. She wrote her first album living in a three-story warehouse turned communal art-and-living space. There was no central heating but there was a music studio and a sensory deprivation tank. “I was living off rice and beans and dumpster bread, and young enough that it wasn’t a health problem yet.” Her parents were middle-class. There was no holiday home or fancy trips abroad, but her mum would buy her organic strawberries and tea-tree lotion. When she left home to pursue music, Mering was convinced she could make it work. “I thought I’d be able to pay crazy low rent, work at a coffee store and sell my cassette tapes.” After all, she had seen her parents’ generation do it. “But by my time, you couldn’t do that anymore. ” Rent was soaring and so were monthly expenses.

Natalie Mering released her debut album ‘The Outside Room’ in 2011 (Neelam Khan Vela)

“I also wasn’t very hireable,” she says. “You had to be kind of shiny to get a decent job; you had to look pretty good to work in a coffee shop or have a really cheerful disposition to be a nanny.” Mering was fired from her nanny job because she only had one pair of shoes. “I really wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t have any connections or family money to make that a dignified experience, so I lived in the underbelly of society for a while, and that has major health and psychological implications, especially in a place like America.” She laughs a little when she thinks about how her Gen X friends were once able to buy their houses just by selling CDs, raising her eyebrows as if to say, “Can you imagine?”

That is the biggest upside to her recent success. And in the Darkness has received stellar early reviews and she is playing bigger and bigger venues. “It means I can pay rent now – and afford to have a dog!” Mering has a Pomeranian called Luigi back home. But the rest of it doesn’t interest her as much. “I don’t want to say it’s all bad but most people I know who have hit a level of success," she explains. “Usually that comes with a great existential crisis.”

‘And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ is out on 18 November via Sub Pop