Marissa Nadler – New Radiations (Bella Union) (13th Floor Album Review)
New Radiations, the tenth studio album by Marissa Nadler, is a slow-burning, hypnotic immersion into shadowed soundscapes and aching introspection.
Its eleven tracks drift between shimmering folk textures and unsettling, disorienting atmospherics. Nadler’s voice, weighted with melancholy, guides the listener through soundscapes of psychic fatigue, quiet despair, and the fragile promise of renewal. The effect is like half-remembering fragments of a dream while in limbo between waking and sleep.
Marissa Nadler has spent two decades perfecting her art of dream-folk, blending acoustic guitar, spectral melodies, and lyrical narratives. Emerging from her early self-released Ballads of Living and Dying and The Saga of Mayflower May through acclaimed works like July, Strangers, and The Path of the Clouds, she has built a catalogue that remains consistent in tone while exploring new textures. Alongside her official albums, Nadler’s numerous self-released EPs and home recordings mark a relentless and restless creativity, until an uncharacteristic four-year pause, now ended with this album. That pause was a deliberate break from the challenges of touring with a band and the need for space to process the turbulent early 2020s.
Milky Burgess is the album’s principal collaborator, serving as co-engineer, co-arranger and instrumentalist and contributing textures that frame Nadler’s voice. Her acoustic guitar, alternating between careful picking and gentle strums, is surrounded by waves of synthesisers that add an otherworldly atmosphere. These minimal, drum-free arrangements amplify the lyrics’ emotional gravity and allow her voice to remain the centre of attention. This dynamic is clear from the opening moments of It Hits Harder, where the folk-inspired guitar and ethereal vocals meet a heavy, disorientating drone. The lyrics read like a dispatch from emotional exile: “It’s never winter here, new year without snow / Wish we could talk, so far away, I know.”
The theme of distance, geographical, emotional, and temporal, threads throughout the record. Bad Dreams leans into darkness with slow, heavy guitar strums under the confession “I couldn’t breathe.” You Called Her Camellia carries a gentler folk lilt, yet its undercurrent is still tinged with unease, while Smoke Screen swirls in unsettling shimmer before Nadler’s voice emerges like a faint signal through static.
The title track, New Radiations, offers a momentary lifting of the gloom with lighter strums and softly layered vocals, evoking the sensation of light breaking through ice. This metaphor of emergence recurs across the record, often in tension with songs like Hatchet Man, where sparse guitar frames a narrative of violence, or Sad Satellite, where circling bass lines underscore isolation. Even when the arrangements open up, as in Weightless Above the Water or Light Years, the atmosphere remains one of absence rather than presence.
Across the album, these sonic and lyrical motifs reinforce one another. The slow pacing, careful layering, and the way Marissa Nadler’s voice floats just above the instrumentation draw the listener in. New Radiations feels like a record about surviving in suspended time, about sensing subtle shifts after a long period of stasis. These songs linger long after they end, resonating like those “new radiations” that signal change is finally coming.
John Bradbury
New Radiations is out now on Bella Union.
