Nailah Hunter angles her compositions toward the spiritual realm. A pastor’s daughter, she once said that her upbringing left her with a “residue of Christian faith,” but her music draws more upon the tenets of astrology and mysticism. The Los Angeles-based artist was singing in choir when a harpist joined their performance one year; she was transfixed by the instrument’s ethereal tones and regal beauty (“Even in the way that it looks, the crown is pointed to the heavens,” she said in an interview with KEXP). As a harpist for sound baths and meditation sessions, Hunter’s relationship with the instrument has not only shaped the way she composes, but how she approaches the tedium of daily life; she is a firm believer that the frequencies emanating from the harp have healing properties.
Hunter’s six-song EP Spells, released in 2020, was written to conjure reflection and tranquility, twisting elements of ambient, experimental, and new age into gilded strands. For her debut full-length Lovegaze, the musician sketched out songs on a borrowed Celtic harp in a small city on the southern coast of England, later enlisting London producer Cicely Goulder to sharpen and shine their edges. Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.
“Through the Din,” with its looped and layered vocals, circular beat, and icy synth tremors, recalls early Portishead, while Hunter’s falsetto glimmers through its moody ambiance, like headlights cutting through fog. Goulder fleshes out the song, supplying strangeness and complexity with a cascade of piano keys that ground Hunter’s skyward harp. Hunter could easily play it safe, swaddling the listener in major scales and good vibes, but Lovegaze suggests she’s interested in augmenting form and genre.
Hunter’s compositions are spacious and dynamic, fine-tuned with Goulder’s meticulous production choices. She handles every plucked harp string, every silken filament of Hunter’s voice, with the utmost delicacy. On the title track, Hunter and Goulder fuse baroque balladry with abstract jazz, smearing Hunter’s harp chords and stacked harmonies with reverb and letting crisp snare rhythms snap at the surface. The off-kilter details—kinked guitar lines, askew trills of alto flute—contrast Hunter’s willowy voice, accenting its elegance without overwhelming it.
Hunter is even more restrained on the album’s second half, which includes “Cloudbreath,” an iridescent, rippling instrumental of harp, flute, and synthesizer. The pared-back arrangement and production on pieces like “Bleed” and “Adorned” draws the ear to Hunter’s subtle yet evocative lyrics. On the latter, Hunter drapes her voice over droning, organ-like synths and sleek ribbons of saxophone. “Far from remorse/It’s the pain you adorn,” she sings. Her efficient phrasing positions psychic wounds as medals, or all-new limbs to tend to. Singing the line “pain you adorn” repeatedly, Hunter gestures at our compulsion to feed personal suffering with constant, damaging attention.
Dark little crevices, tucked into the calming expanses of Lovegaze, add a lyrical complexity that’s missing from the album’s first half. The finest example is the spare and intriguing “Into the Sun.” Part medieval dirge, part demented nursery rhyme, the song is stretched across a scaffolding of harp plucks and Hunter’s earthiest register. “I dream of beheadings/And goose feather bedding on fire,” she sings, climbing from a crackling low to a gauzy falsetto. “A sword through the eye/For an endless supply of beginnings.” The arcane, violent imagery bristles against Hunter’s sparkling strings, forging instant tension and intrigue. In these vivid passages, Hunter endures the pangs of change in order to transcend her pain, luminous and unburdened.
