Alexandra Drewchin has often worried about getting lost in the clouds. Across the decade of records she’s made as Eartheater, she’s cloaked herself in abstraction, both as a lyricist and producer. She’s drifted between genres but most often favored sounds that are slippery by design. On her earliest records for the Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain, she made daydreaming psychedelic folk, contemplating the nature of existence over acoustic guitar lines that spin out like spiderwebs. On her ensuing albums, she explored blunted trip-hop ambiance and chest-rattling club deconstructions as she scuffed up the edges of even her most pop-oriented songwriting. It’s music that requires you to pay close attention to wring out meaning and emotion: Finding a path through the haze has always been a part of the point. Still, Drewchin has occasionally reflected on the drawbacks of this approach. “The danger is in being too profound,” she told VICE in 2018. "The higher you fly, the smaller you look to others.”
The latest Eartheater album, Heavenly Body: If I’m the Bottle You’re the Message, feels like a corrective. Across the record, Drewchin’s feet are planted squarely on terra firma, and she writes in a more grounded and direct mode than she ever has before. Work commenced on the record three months after Drewchin welcomed the arrival of her first child, Nova, a period in which she was consumed with the reality and potentialities of being a new parent. For Drewchin, the experience upended her understanding of herself and her body—she’s described having a child as “like having an earthquake inside of you”—and the album documents the physical and emotional highs and lows she’s undergone. There’s less metaphor, less reverb, less acrobatic melody. Even with some bigger names involved—like superproducer Dave Sitek and fellow recent mother Oklou (who sings on “Fast Asleep)—the record feels smaller, more intimate. There was no room, it seems, for the opaque mysticism of previous records. The songs are lucid and explicit, delivered with the gravitas of someone whose world has just changed forever.
You can hear this perspective clearly on tracks like “Practical Amnesia,” on which she describes, in unsparing terms, the pain of childbirth and the miraculous way in which the memories of that pain have been entirely replaced by the beauty of the experience. “In any other scenario,” she sings. “We’re predisposed to viscerally recall the sting.” Musically, it’s one of the more straightforward songs she’s released. The instrumental—a loping, meditative trip-pop ballad that recalls, at once, Beck’s work with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Portishead’s more upbeat moments—is subtle and delicate, devoid of ornamentation that might distract from her reflections on this mystifying aspect of new motherhood.
Drewchin operates in this more restrained mode throughout the record, peeling back the layers of her dizzying art pop. The record’s closing track, “Nova,” is a straightforward piano ballad addressed to her newborn child, celebrating Nova for her own sake but also for the way that her arrival transformed her. “I’ve been a star but now you turn/You turn me into a nebula,” she sings. “A new kind of love.” It’s the kind of tender ballad that wouldn’t feel out of place on Björk’s Vespertine, a record with its own moving meditations on motherhood. Heavenly Body’s best moments are in a similarly hushed register, like on “Fast Asleep,” where Drewchin and Oklou’s crystalline vocals are accompanied by lapping synthesizers that recall Gigi Masin’s aqueous programming. This palette extends through a lot of the record; rarely does she dip into the more chaotic beats that marked past records. It’s an entirely different mood than the one that once inspired her to wield a chainsaw at a live show—this is a record that prizes comfort and stillness, even amid the emotional uncertainty.
Drewchin refuses to shy away from the physical realities of pregnancy and birth. On “Glowing Guts,” she describes looking in the mirror and seeing a distorting body, experiencing heartburn, and enduring the repetitive experience of giving urine and blood samples at a doctor’s office. It’s anxious and jarring and real, accompanied by an instrumental that bleats like a malfunctioning heart rate monitor. Drewchin might once have used her songs to meditate on meaning, to stare at the sky for answers, but Heavenly Body is a document of a time when those existential concerns took a backseat to the urgency of the physical changes in her life. On these songs, she dwells in the moments that inspired their creation, reveling in both the joy and the pain.
