In March 2025, during the full Virgo lunar eclipse, Natalie Mering found herself trapped in Big Sur, California. Deep in the woods, a tree had fallen over a power line, blocking the road out of the canyon and effectively shutting off all of the electricity in the immediate area. “I didn’t have cell service, and I couldn’t leave this cabin,” recalls the 37-year-old singer-songwriter, who performs as Weyes Blood. “That place is so mystically isolated.”
Accompanied by her dog, a rescued Pomeranian named Luigi, Mering passed the time building fires and working on her new album, the follow-up to 2022’s dreamy, psychedelic And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Normally, she would have gone straight to recording new music after her most recent tour wrapped in the fall of 2023, but this new era is different. If it comes out at any time in the next year or more, this will be the longest she’s ever spent working on an album. “I was like, ‘I need to live that real-person life and have experiences that aren’t just wandering around singing,’” she says over Zoom. “It’s been a journey.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. In late 2024, Mering spent a month in Spain, writing songs and visiting friends in the fishing village of Lastres. In January 2025, the day after she returned to Los Angeles, she lost her home in the Eaton Fire. “I’ve been in exile since then,” she says. “It’s been great to get to experience so many different places, even though it’s also been topsy-turvy.”
After Big Sur, Mering headed east to New York, where she lived more than a decade ago, spending time in sublets on the Lower East Side and in the West Village. “There’s a certain poetry to New York,” she says. “You’re confronted with humanity every day. When you’ve lived in L.A. for nine years, and to cap it all off, it ends in a crazy, very heartbreaking natural disaster, my first thought was like, ‘I should just get back in touch with the East Coast spirit of things, and why I started making music in the first place.’”
She began recording at Electric Lady Studios, downstairs in Studio B. “It’s like a submarine,” she says. “It’s really close to the underwater river, and I guess Jimi Hendrix built that space there to be close to the flow. We would get in there, and seven hours would just zip by without a single glance at the sun. We would just be in our bunker, experimenting. It was an amazing, timeless kind of energy.”
The album marks Mering’s first time executive-producing, working alongside her longtime collaborator Jonathan Rado and other producers, as well as Nick Movshon on bass, Homer Steinweiss on drums, Benny Bock on keyboards, and more. She’s had a title in mind the entire process, but she doesn’t want to reveal it quite yet. “I don’t want to jinx it,” she says. “But it’s very reflective of the time I’m at in my life, and how much being a woman changes over time.”
Eventually, Mering decided not to stay in New York. “I thought I was going to move there, but then something happened,” she says. “My body started yearning for California, my true home.” So she returned to L.A., heading back to the beach and the desert, and continued recording at a studio in Malibu.
Logan White
At the time of our interview in late March, Mering says the album is 90 percent done. In the meantime, she’s been off social media (“I go dark when I make a record”), only getting her news from podcasts. She recently contributed to Oneohtrix Point Never’s soundtrack for Marty Supreme, the Oscar-nominated film directed by Josh Safdie and starring Timothée Chalamet. While Chalamet was promoting the film in a video interview, he asked his co-star Gwyneth Paltrow if she’d heard of Weyes Blood (while mispronouncing her stage name — memo to Timothée, it rhymes with “wise,” not “ways”). Paltrow looked utterly confused, and told him to check out Bonnie Raitt.
Reflecting on this moment, Mering laughs. “When you put something like a signal out into the world, you’ll be surprised at where that signal lands. And that was maybe the most surprising landing of all.”
For now, she’s going to continue drifting from place to place, finding inspiration wherever she finds it. “Things have changed so much,” she says. “I’ve changed so much. The amount of grief, from witnessing everything that’s happening, can feel insurmountable. I think it just took me a minute to reorient the purpose of it all, and get back in touch with my roots.”
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