Nina Nastasia – Riderless Horse

The more than a decade between Nina Nastasia’s last studio album Outlaster and her new one Riderless Horse is the result of, in her own words, "unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan.” The Kennan in question is Kennan Gudjonsson, Nastasia’s former partner, manager and producer, whose 2020 suicide and the relationship they had, colours the album. It’s indicative of Nastasia’s talent as a songwriter that this period has brought a record as powerful and quietly emotionally vibrant as this. 

The record strips away the full band and strings approach that were so key to the gothic atmospheres of her previous works, and leaves in their place just her voice and delicate guitar playing. It’s a brave move – the use of strings throughout her career has felt as crucial to her sound as her voice or guitar, but it pays off, often in remarkable fashion. The new, unadorned style gives an immediacy to her playing, a sense of closeness. This, combined with Steve Albini’s typically naturalistic production, removes any obfuscation from the songwriting giving songs like the bruising This is Love and The Roundabout a very specific physical power, less like a recording and more as if you’re sat in front of her as she unleashes the song from within her for the first time.

This sense of a song being born in real time extends to the guitar playing as well. Not in an improvised way; rather it’s minimal, and never showy but always developing with feeling. It’s crucial to the lightness of touch that the record has a feeling of delicate hope that hovers in even its darkest songs. It gives the several songs of gentle joy across the album their buoyancy, never more evident than in the springy fingerpicking that carries Blind as Batsies along on its lovely wind of precarious optimism. It’s this simplicity, coupled with her ever gorgeous but similarly understated voice, that makes a song like the glowering Nature hit so hard. It feels coiled, primed to burst at any moment. 

It’s been a long time, but Riderless Horse is a timely reminder of what Nina Nastasia has always done. Great songs, performed brilliantly, to devastating effect. A record of powerful simplicity, and a stunning return.

Listen to: This Is Love, The Roundabout, Nature