Last year, Weyes Blood, the moniker of Natalie Mering, debuted her stunning record Titanic Rising. Since its release, Mering has toured, performed on late-night talk shows, and even lent a hand on Drugdealer’s latest album. Now, the singer returns to share a self-directed video accompanying her Titanic Rising track “Wild Time.”
In the grainy video, Mering rediscovers the therapeutic soothing of emerging yourself in nature and eventually gets caught up in cult-like rituals. Shot amid a backdrop of golden rolling hills and quaint streams, the visual echos her albums’ themes of nature and nostalgia.
In a verbose message to fans alongside the video, Weyes Blood described the sentiment behind the video and announced she is canceling all of her 2020 shows and focusing on her next album:
“Here is a video for my song ‘Wild Time’ that was shot on 16mm pre-Pandemic, then edited together during isolation. Felt like the right time to let this video out into the world, seeing as we’re all getting saddled down by some pretty grim realities. This song is about yearning for wildness and Mother Nature in a time of chaos. It’s for sensitive people who worry about the fate of humanity and feel powerless to do anything about it.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking apocalyptic thoughts and realizing that won’t get you anywhere. What if the world has always been ending? What if the sprawl of our cities are just as wild as the forests? What if climate change and the destruction of our natural habitat is a reflection of the nature within us, however sublimely horrifying and hard to understand? We’re animals, we play out a very precarious drama of life, and we grasp for what’s left of the protective womb — but maybe the notion that we’re somehow separated from her is an illusion. Maybe it is, truly, a wild time to be alive. Maybe getting in touch with that as a culture and society would avert the worst case scenarios of ecological crisis and existential dread.
If you’ve gotten this far, wow, thank you for actually taking the time to read this. In other news, as you may have assumed, I am canceling all of my headline shows for 2020, but I’m beginning to work on my next album that will come out in 2021- a different time, when hopefully we can see each other face to face once again.”
Watch Weyes Blood’s “Wild Time” video above.
Titanic Rising is out now via Sub Pop. Get it here.