The Weather Station’s work has earned praised for its seamless elegance and fluidity, especially since Tamara Lindeman expanded the project’s folksy origins on 2021’s breakout Ignorance. But never has the Toronto-based singer-songwriter paid attention to the seams – the parts of life and art that, as she acknowledges on the closer ‘Sewing’, most people are willing to ignore – as she does on her visceral new album, Humanhood. Affording space to both the sophistipop grandeur of Ignorance and the free-flowing intimacy of its companion LP, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman and her remarkable band trace the process of dissociation, laying out the broken pieces and the possibility of reintegrating them, the shakiness of truth and all the purpose it provides. Humanhood keeps moving like that, imperfect but enlightened, the music an “undulating thing,” as Lindeman puts it, “this blanket I seem to be making from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.”
1. Descent
Humanhood flutters into existence with an improvised track that’s as much an extended intro for ‘Neon Signs’ as it is an introduction to the band that animates the record: drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Phillippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley. Tamara Lindeman may bring other musicians into the fold, but she relies on the sextet’s vibrant chemistry to situate the record and mold it into shape.
2. Neon Signs
The ambience of ‘Descent’ kicks into a robust pulse, but Lindeman isn’t energized so much as bewildered and misdirected by a flurry of misinformation and advertising. “Every flashing light tries to fool you,” she sings, a synth pitched just on the threshold of dissonance, as the alluring tangle of instrumentation gradually blends into the singer’s dissociative spiral. Lindeman handles her lyricism with great dexterity, drawing a line between the perils of consumerism and romantic deception in a way only she could. “Never enough in a world without trust, determined broken open and refusing to adjust,” she laments, holding on to a memory that cuts through the pain: “I swear to god I saw real love once.”
3. Mirror
It takes less than half a minute of shuffling around for the band to lock into the record’s tightest and most irresistible groove, one that’s still under threat of coming apart. As synths and strings briefly wash away the rhythm, you wonder, is it smoke or light, something godly or just human? “Everything slips,” Lindeman reminds us, echoing the sentiment of the previous song. “Silver unknown from the lens of your eye, as if into a pool, back up again to rise – and come back at you, doubled in size.”
4. Window
Against the dizzyingly hurried pace of ‘Window’, Lindeman can’t help but stop for breath: “My heart is racing/ as a window/ Opens somewhere/ To let me out,” she repeats at the start, melding the gap between window and opens into a sigh. Losing the thread between literal and metaphorical pain, she’s restless to touch ground, to carve a path back into her own life, fumbling for a definition for what’s coursing through her body. It comes to her in a poetic flash: “A ribbon in the wind, unruly, static, this noise within this must-do can’t-say kind of feeling.” She can’t stay, she decides, but the song, short as it is, leaves a mark.
5. Passage
Quite literally a passage between ‘Window’ and ‘Body Moves’, just a minute of shimmering static: a way out, or a way in, however you want to look at it.
6. Body Moves
Musically, ‘Body Moves’ feels like a soft exhale, but only the kind that precedes a painful confession. Lindeman’s language is stark, open to the plain truth, even if the object of desire, of the body’s foolishness, is left to the imagination. Stress, fear, numbness – they all led to this mess, this end-of-the-world feeling that pervades Humanhood, but they accumulate here as a means of explaining, a thing of the past. Lindeman often writes ambivalently in the first person, but the you here feels even more personal and damning. It’s the narrator coming clean, even if only to herself.
7. Ribbon
From this point forward, Humanhood seems to soften. Coloured by contributions from Sam Amidon on fiddle and James Elkington on guitar, ‘Ribbon’ ties Lindeman’s pain with everything around it, the natural world and human beings depending on it. She goes “straight down to the water just to put my hands in it/ Feel if it’s cold/ Bring it to my mouth to taste the salt/ Tang on my lips, just like a kiss.” And a kiss, as she sang on How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, is a form of balance. Ordinary, yes, but also binding.
8. Fleuve
The twinkling piano of ‘Ribbon’ loops into ‘Fleuve’, another minute-long interlude, giving the listener a taste of that pure sensation of trailing your fingers through the water. You’re reminded how much of this record was born of improvisation, and how beautifully it’s flowed into place.
9. Humanhood
If the past couple of tracks mirrored the feeling of tracing your hand through the water, the title song is diving your whole body in, twitching the record back to life. It’s oddly gritty and glitchy, but also oceanic, anchored by Adams’ momentous drumming as Lindeman sings about carrying her entire humanhood, weightless for a moment yet weighed down by generational responsibility. The band’s music has often been described as graceful, but ‘Humanhood’ leans into the clumsiness of pushing through the decaying world, the endless fear, all while trying to wring meaning out of words. But push through it does.
10. Irreversible Damage
Over a shuffling, King of Limbs-esque groove, Lindeman samples a phone call with her friend, Erin Orstynova. More than just touching on the record’s themes of climate grief and personal loss, the conversation – Orstynova’s end of it, rather – moves between them, as Lindeman lyrically does on ‘Neon Signs’. What do you do when your body seems to shatter into a million pieces? What can you do? Some pieces are just gone, she concludes, and the band lets that sink in before the subject shifts to the persistence of wild beauty, even amidst catastrophe. There’s barely any separation between the voice recording and the live music, which only drives the point home.
11. Lonely
It’s striking that ‘Lonely’ is sequenced after ‘Irreversible Damage’, matching the way a simple conversation with a friend can suddenly ground your inner turmoil. Could this strange tangle of emotion, as well as the actual pain, be nothing but a symptom of loneliness? Rueful and perfectly stripped back, ‘Lonely’ builds off that realization to lay out the story of a bigger, uniquely genuine kind of love – the kind that doesn’t stave off loneliness so much as it unites a couple over their shared understanding of it. “It don’t fix everything/ But I felt so changed,” Lindeman sings of not being lonely anymore, of feeling the mistrust melt away. It’s the type of unburdening that’s impossible without music – for Lindeman, at least, and probably you listening – which is why she ends with a story of going down to the Tranzac’s Southern Cross Lounge in her native Toronto to hear friends play. To listen “to a song being sung, and Thom playing some dissonant run, that reminds me, somehow, of that same knot that’s come undone.” Lindeman traces it all the way through Humanhood.
12. Aurora
Like the album’s other ambient pieces, the title of this final interlude is evocative of its mood, which is wonderfully sustained, here, for just a bit longer than the previous ones.
13. Sewing
It’s a privilege to listen to ‘Sewing’ so close to the start of a new year, when everything that marked the old one tends to blur together: “Aimless days, bad moods, the changes I can’t get used to.” For Lindeman, it serves as a metaphor for her own creative practice and the impulse to scrub away the truth, its messy core, especially at the very end of the process. But just as a blinding light threatens to wash it all away, her voice comes back, unchanged. It has rarely sounded so fragile, the drums somehow as tenderly expressive as the piano, the blanket of synths so crucial in stitching it all together. As if humanity itself rests on an inexplicable and imperfect vision, on submitting to the simplest pleasures and committing to knowing them deeply. On a guess, basically, that we venture together.