The Weather Station – Humanhood

On The Weather Station’s restless, swirling, visceral new album, Tamara Lindeman considers the state of being human

Album Review by Zoë White | 13 Jan 2025
  • The Weather Station - Humanhood
Album title: Humanhood
Artist: The Weather Station
Label: Fat Possum Records
Release date: 17 Jan

‘I touch the edge of it / Just a glimpse of it / My own life, I guess’, Tamara Lindeman sings amid a whirlwind of flutes on The Weather Station’s new album. After exploring climate grief on 2021’s acclaimed Ignorance, the Canadian songwriter, who started the band in 2006, experienced a period of chronic depersonalisation. At the heart of her seventh LP, Humanhood, is the desire to get back to the self, to reclaim both individual and collective humanhood.

Matching this sense of displacement, the album’s soundscape is in constant motion. Flurries of woodwind spiral wildly, percussion is shivery, fidgety, songs frayed at the edges. It’s as if the tightly controlled grooves of Ignorance have been shaken loose and scattered into the wind. 

Lead single Neon Signs is a vibrant, flickering song about the breakdown of trust, while Irreversible Damage considers wild landscapes that are irrevocably changed by us but still the closest thing to wilderness we have. On final track Sewing, Lindeman resolves to accept the bad with the good, using a patchwork quilt as a metaphor for collective healing. ‘Too late for perfection, to clean up the mess / Too late to take it all back again’, she sings, ‘All I can do is sew it in'.

Listen to: Neon Signs, Humanhood, Sewing

http://theweatherstation.net