In “Irreversible Damage,” the emotional centerpiece of the Weather Station’s seventh album, Humanhood, we hear a moving conversation between songwriter and bandleader Tamara Lindeman and a friend. “When you get shattered into a million pieces,” the friend asks over warping synth chords and a meandering saxophone melody, “what can you do?” Can you put the pieces back together? How do you try? The conversation— mixed so that the human voices are not above or in front of their instrumental companions but woven among them—concerns personal heartache and environmental catastrophe both. The conversation, like much of Humanhood, doesn’t definitively answer the questions it poses; instead, it stares at that shattering directly, considering equally the destruction it caused and the potential to rebuild.
The Weather Station has been releasing emotionally attuned, patiently beautiful music for over a decade. But 2021’s Ignorance represented a breakthrough, a stunning record where Lindeman’s early folksy singer-songwriter sound blossomed with a full band: bass, keys, and guitar, plus two drummers, a saxophonist, and a flutist. Much of that record centered on the climate crisis, and Lindeman’s personal mourning at its unfolding—how the loss of species and the destruction of ecosystems is not just a political or structural failure, but also can truly break a person’s heart. Its follow-up, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, was looser and more intimate, a quieter companion to Ignorance’s audaciousness.
For Humanhood, Lindeman regrouped with Ignorance’s rhythm section, plus two additional musicians on woodwinds and bass, and spent two sessions improvising at Canterbury Music Company in Toronto. These recordings were later overdubbed with banjo, fiddle, guitar, strings, synth, and percussion. The group effort renders Humanhood’s songs lush and circuitous, seemingly propelled by an internal logic that’s being pieced together as you hear it. Many songs, including the jazzy “Mirror” or the aching “Ribbon,” feature extended, wordless outros where instruments drift in and out. Elsewhere, abstract instrumental tracks—“Descent,” “Passage,” “Aurora”—seem to offer a chance to breathe; still, the soundscapes created by their wallops of static and creeping crescendos hardly let the album’s tangled tensions evaporate.
Lindeman’s exquisite voice is, as ever, the gravitational center of the record. In certain moments—as on “Sewing” or “Lonely”—her singing can turn conversational, or become light as a whisper. Her voice feels close to your ear and, if you listen closely, you can hear a note of strain, like she’s divulging something she’s not quite ready to share. Lindeman comes by this fractured, anxious perspective honestly—many of these songs were written about her experience with chronic depersonalization that followed the release of Ignorance. “My mind glitching, kinda/Thinking dark thoughts lately,” she sings on Humanhood’s title track, “I should admit to somebody/Feeling cut off lately.” She asks herself: “Was I a person?”
Still, you don’t have to suffer a psychological break to relate to feeling cleaved from a stable personal identity or even losing your grip on the truth these days. Lindeman has said her perspective on Humanhood is also informed by the rise of disinformation, rampant political division, gridlock on climate action, and A.I.’s threats against creative labor—and destabilization on a personal scale, too. “A relationship can be a little personal fascism,” Lindeman has said. “It doesn’t really feel very different to living in a world where there’s absolutely no concern being given to the biggest planetary crisis.” The sound of the album—where acoustic instruments like banjo and fiddle are layered atop washes of synth, where moments of melody burst from clattering static—reflects this search for meaning within chaos.
Over and over on Humanhood, Lindeman returns to the physical body. It’s both a source of pain (“Look at this mess,” she sings on “Body Moves”: “Your body fooled you”) and a way out of it. On “Ribbon” and the title track, she brings her body to bodies of water; she tastes river water, goes for a swim. “Maybe if I go down to the water,” she sings on “Humanhood, “maybe I can get back into my body.” Her lyrics are sometimes narrative, but often elliptical and fragmentary—the product of a mind moving from dissociation and back toward connection. On the spare and restrained “Lonely,” she sings of listening to music performed by friends; she calls it “a simple recipe,” a type of “medicine” that allows her to sit calmly with her shame and darkness. In the album’s closing song, she offers the metaphor of sewing a quilt that can contain it all: fear and love and boredom, the natural world and all its imperfection. When she gets “hit by a shattering pain,” she sings, “I won’t try to forget/I’m going to include it.” The solution to Lindeman’s crisis—of depersonalization, but all the systemic crises too—doesn’t lie in blocking out the mess, she suggests, or in building a tether to a stable, solitary self. Rather, on an album of collaboratively made, piercingly beautiful music, she finds relief in tracing the seams that bind everything together.
