Titanic Rising

Natalie Mering recorded Front Row Seat to Earth, the 2016 album that earned Weyes Blood a Best New Music from Pitchfork, in a garage, and she has said it felt like band practice. Sub Pop signed her in 2017, after three albums on Not Not Fun and Mexican Summer, and her label debut, Titanic Rising, came out on 5 April 2019 as her fourth album. This time she had a string quartet, more than a dozen players and a co-producer, Jonathan Rado of Foxygen. “I never had the chance to work with strings until now,” she told the A.V. Club.

She picked Rado, who had produced Whitney and Father John Misty, partly because he was comfortable with her co-producing, she told 88Nine Radio Milwaukee. Sub Pop dates the writing and recording to the first half of 2018. By her account they avoided click tracks and kept takes where a tempo drifts or an instrument sits slightly off pitch. For the instrumental title track, the two spent a couple of days trying to copy Robert Fripp’s tape-loop system and ended up with their own version, two reel-to-reel machines feeding into each other, which they called Radotronics. She says they also played Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic in the studio while they worked.

Brian D’Addario and Michael D’Addario, the brothers behind the Lemon Twigs, play across the record. Brian co-produced “Mirror Forever” and wrote the string arrangement for the opener, “A Lot’s Gonna Change”. The strings on nine tracks are the four members of the Section Quartet: Eric Gorfain, Daphne Chen, Leah Katz and Richard Dodd. On “Andromeda” Blake Mills plays slide over Rado’s LinnDrum, a machine Mering loves from Barry Gibb’s 1980s demos. Chris Cohen, who co-produced Front Row Seat to Earth, drums on “Something to Believe” and “Wild Time”, Drew Erickson plays clavinet on “Everyday”, and on “Movies” Michael Chadwick’s arpeggiated synthesizer carries the song until the strings take over. Kenny Gilmore mixed it.

The title points at the ship and at James Cameron’s 1997 film, which Mering watched over and over as a girl. She reads the disaster as human arrogance against nature, with the third class paying first, and ties its iceberg to a warming planet. “Everyday” is about dating apps; “Movies” comes from a distrust of cinema that kept her from watching films for about three years around puberty; “Picture Me Better” became a song for a friend who died by suicide while she was making the album. Brett Stanley shot the cover in a Long Beach pool, without CGI, in a bedroom set Mering designed; the set lasted a few hours underwater. “Andromeda” came out in January 2019, “Everyday” in February with a slasher-style video she directed, and “Movies” in March. In 2022 Sub Pop called the album the first of a trilogy.

Pitchfork’s Quinn Moreland gave it 8.5 and heard her pushing further than on any earlier record. Kitty Empire in the Observer called it her most assured album and picked “Movies” as its highlight, Mojo and the Independent gave it five stars, and AllMusic’s Fred Thomas heard the clearest songwriting she had done. Loud and Quiet gave it 6/10, observing that the dissonance of her earlier records had mostly been smoothed away, NME’s Jordan Bassett preferred the subtler balance of Front Row Seat to Earth, and Clash found “Everyday” the least satisfying moment. In the UK it reached No. 68 on the albums chart and No. 1 on the Americana chart; in the US it missed the Billboard 200 but reached No. 3 on Heatseekers. Paste ranked it the best album of 2019, Pitchfork ninth and the Guardian tenth, and it was No. 143 on Pitchfork’s list of the 2010s.

Nothing Mering had made before worked on this scale or aimed this high, and the reach pays off because the songs stay plain and conversational under the strings and tape loops. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, the trilogy’s second part, made with Rado in 2022, refined the method without bettering it, and her next album was still unannounced when she debuted two new songs at the BBC Proms in September 2026. For now this is her best record and the place to start. It ends with “Nearer to Thee”, just over a minute of the opening song’s strings; Pitchfork heard in its title the hymn the Titanic’s band is said to have played as the ship went down.