Eartheater – Heavenly Body: If I'm the Bottle You're the Message

Eartheater has long been focused on bodily and spiritual transformation, as well as sex. This meant that the possibility of a record detailing her pregnancy oddly felt like treading water. But this isn’t the case. Her ever-changing sound, which has mutated over a decade from murky electronics into a kind of runway-ready experimental pop seems to coalesce here, magpieing from across her discography; a little of the ecclesiastical sweep of Phoenix, the bubbling swagger of Trinity, once more shifting them into something implacable.

There’s still that Amex ad sheen that coloured her last album, Powders, but, when married to the intensity of feeling the record channels, it colours the songs with this entranced sense of distance. It’s particularly apparent on the mesmeric duo of Practical Amnesia and Crown Jewel, the latter of which makes her feel like the centre figure in a snow globe, steadfastly watching the uncontrollable twirl around her.

It’s a shame then that the album doesn’t quite keep up this steam, and it’s in its back half where it falls away a little, the production becoming unusually characterless. The visceral nature of new life is still channeled in the lyrics, but it is left behind sonically, the dead chug of Favorite evocative of nothing in particular, while the Oklou-guesting Fast Asleep goes for a kind of mechanistic lullaby, but only feels like a ghost of the album’s earlier, better moments.

Listen to: Crown Jewel, Practical Amnesia, Paradise Rains