MARISSA NADLER

Nadler lays the listener — and herself — on the line with July, her sixth full-length album in nearly a decade; it floats freely in the pop cosmos somewhere between gauzy shoegaze, unvarnished folk, and even a hint of metal’s doom-and-gloom spirit. “Drive” opens the record with one of her most devastating lines, addressing a quandary we have all grappled with at some point: “If you ain’t made it now / You’re never gonna make it.” There is catharsis in the chorus: “Nothin’ like the way it feels / To drive,” she sings amid a choir of celestial harmonies, elongating that last word as if it were a car bounding down a long stretch of lost highway. It’s Nadler at her most elemental: warm but spectral, vulnerable but resilient.

Recorded at Seattle’s Avast Studio, the album pairs Nadler for the first time with producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Wolves in the Throne Room). Dunn matches Nadler’s darkness by creating a multi-colored sonic palette that infuses new dimensions into her songs. Eyvind Kang’s strings, Steve Moore’s synths, and Phil Wandscher’s guitar lines escalate the whole affair to a panoramic level of beautiful, eerie wonder.

"The Sister is a great record for many reasons – Nadler’s voice and playing being two – but it’s the frank and realistic portrayals of relationships that makes what could have been a difficult record so engaging and easy to relate to. Singer-songwriters are ten-a-penny, but with such a true and pure voice – and astonishing musical ability – Marissa Nadler deserves to be raised and garlanded above most others." - The Line Of Best Fit

Her voice, too, is something to behold here, at once clarion but heavy with the kind of tear-stained emotion you hear on scratchy old country records by the likes of Tammy Wynette and Sammi Smith. Long gone are the days when Nadler summoned images of 1960s folk singers who got lost in the woods. She is a cosmic force on “July,” shooting these songs to euphoric highs and heartbreaking lows.

July is the kind of release that reminds you why NPR counts Nadler’s songwriting as so “revered among an assortment of tastemakers.” This is a singular achievement for the artist, a record she couldn’t have made earlier in her career because, as every songwriter knows, she didn’t just write these songs: she lived them.