The Weather Station – “Neon Signs” [Video]

The Weather Station — the project of Toronto-based Tamara Lindeman — announces herreturn with Humanhood, out January 17th via Fat Possum, and releases lead single/video, “Neon Signs.” Humanhood, the most arresting album Lindeman has ever made as The Weather Station, follows 2021’s Ignorance, “an invigorating and poignant chapter in an already impressive career” (Stereogum). It was written during one of the most difficult periods of Lindeman’s life and rendered with a rock band with improvisational chops just as she began to recover by reckoning with a complicated truth: Sometimes, life simply tries to dismantle us, no matter how good everything may seem, and we must accept that in order to survive.

From the outside, 2022 likely appeared a year of glory for Lindeman. Ignorance, in which her “shape-shifting avant-folk [reached] a kind of apex, as she sings coolly about climate grief, love, lust, healing, and the upheaval of self-discovery” (New Yorker), was one of that year’s highest praised records. It was a time of touring, travel, and activism alongside Ignorance’s more austere companion, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. But at an ostensible new professional peak, she was also struggling with a mental health crisis. Working through a crisis of meaning, she wrote from within the confusion of the experience to create the songs that would ultimately become Humanhood, a narrative album that, listened to front to back, transcribes the journey from dissociation back towards connection.

It takes only 10 seconds for Lindeman to pull us to the floor on “Neon Signs”, the opening song on Humanhood. “I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy—or just lazy,” she sings, her voice at once a soft whisper to a confidant and a full-throated confession to a crowd. “Why can’t I get off this floor? Think straight anymore?” she sings of our true modern malaise, that unbound sense of not knowing how or what it is we’re supposed to contribute to this fractious world, or if we even have the energy or will to try.

“I wrote “Neon Signs” at a moment of feeling confused, upside down, at that moment when even desire falls away, and dissociation cuts you loose from a story that while wrong, still held things together,” Lindeman explains. “The song came with multiple strands entwined; the way that something that is not true seems to have more energetic intensity than something that is, the confusion of being bombarded with advertising at a moment of climate emergency, the confusion of relationships where coercion is wrapped in the language of love. Ultimately though, isn’t it all the same feeling?” The “Neon Signs” video, co-directed by Lindeman and Jared Raab, is a journey through different sets of eyes, perpetually shifting perspectives between people and objects.

Humanhood was recorded over two sessions in fall of 2023 at Canterbury Music Company with drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Philippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley. The songs were left open; Lindeman and co-producer Marcus Paquin wanted to hear the sudden sparks made by these new encounters, to witness everyone react in real-time to the songs and sketches she supplied. They all dropped into the fugue, shaping the hazy unease that is so endemic these days into tangible sound. Other friends eventually added their own pieces, like old-time updater Sam Amidon, ace guitarist James Elkington, and textural magus Joseph Shabason. In the final stage, mixer Joseph Lorge helped make sense of these musical webs, and the album was crafted into a near continuous piece of music, with interstitial instrumentals fading into and out of songs. Textures repeatedly shift between organic and synthetic; synths merging with sax, electronic drums shifting into banjo, as songs coalesce and then disintegrate in a direct echo of the emotional experiences that inspired them.

Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end. As with Ignorance, the first person lyrics point to a wider resonance; we’re all dealing with ourselves through climate disaster, as the world totters near a breaking point, and none of it is easy or precedented. On previous albums, Lindeman mostly wrote about her past, turning backwards to gain perspective. But for Humanhood, she wrote from the present as she tried to work through it. Humanhood, then, radiates with new urgency—and emerges as a sort of tether, offered up here for anyone else feeling disconnected from the vertiginous reality of right now.