One of the many discarded blog post ideas I’ve had over the last 15 years or so was a quick post about female pop stars in the mid 2000s. My post was going to make the case that Rihanna and Katy Perry are not as talented or as wildly creative as the stars we saw rise in the 1990s (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple), but they served their purpose for the present. They did the job, held the fort, and each gave us Super Bowl performances. But flash forward to 2023, and the pop landscape is very different. The best and most artistic artists are not on the big labels. Instead they are the independents. They probably always have been, but now in the streaming music era, they are so much easier to find, share, and mix together.
Lana Del Rey, Jessie Ware, FKA Twigs, Weyes Blood (Natalie Mering), and Caroline Polacek (“the girl in that band”) are not new in the music industry. They are all in their mid to late 30s. But they are the artists who are peaking right now to mark the next wave of greats. Several senior artists have guided them to greatness, particularly Enya. And in the case of Polacek and Wyse Blood, Brian Eno is also an influence. You can hear a lot of Eno in the guitar solo of Weyes Blood’s Mirror Forever and her last two albums overall. I also think Eno’s sound is found in the metallic guitar solo in Polacek’s Billions before Trinity School’s choir (out of Croydon, London) takes us home to close the album. It is May, and I still have Billions down as my best song of 2023, three months after it was officially released.
Natalie Mering admits Eno was on her mind when she made her 2019 album, Titanic Rising. As she explained to the Australian Broadcasting Company:
We created a mood board, which was a picture of the Titanic with Brian Ferry on the stern and Brian Eno on the hull of the ship. It was rising out of the water like a phoenix from the ashes.
Many critics picked-up on the Eno-like sounds and techniques, as AllMusic did:
Here she underscores enormously orchestrated pop songs with eerie experimental ambience, imagining a dreamworld where Joni Mitchell's late-'70s output was produced by Brian Eno.
Titanic Rising was more than a signer-songwriter project. Mering is a co-producer and she made sure her album had digital effects and soundscapes. Working with Jonathan Rado, she added a layer of psychedelic elements, walking the tightrope between futuristic and retro vinyl and cassette sounds. Her reluctant love song Andromeda even opens with the simulated sound of a damaged cassette tape. That sonic direction continues with her latest album and will likely continue with her next, which will close-out a planned trilogy of records for our dark, turbulent times.
While FKA Twigs is working on her new, possibly more commercial album, we must acknowledge the triumph of her second full length album, Magdalene (2019), which helped make 2019 a pivotal year for women music artists. 2019 was also the breakthrough year for Caroline Polachek and Weyes Blood, who seem to recognize this and are now contemplating working together on a song. The year before the pandemic was a like a big bang for this new music. We got a buch of incredible songs like Cellophane, Daybed, Ocean Of Tears, Door, Movies and Wild Time. And now, women in their 30s, who cite Enya as a influence, rule the streaming playlists.
Weyes Blood at KEXP studios, August 2019.