- The harpist sublimates her signature instrument into an atmospheric canvas for gauzy, candlelit love songs and spirituals.
- Nailah Hunter was 19 years old when she began locking herself in a room to practice the harp for six hours a day. Since 2019, she's used the instrument to conjure fantasy worlds through esoteric folk and ambient(ish) music. Where her 2020 EP Spells was, in her words, the least about her that her art has ever been, Lovegaze, her new album on Fat Possum, explores the pursuit of intangibles like love and catharsis. She worked on the tracks in a small coastal town along the English Channel, later bringing them to London-based producer Cicely Goulder to flesh out. The album's mystical instrumentation patiently unfurls—bringing to mind the image of Hunter in stillness, casting spells out of a moonlit garden. Internally, she embarks on an odyssey into the uncharted corners of her emotional world.
Lovegaze still features the harp, but this time the harp asks the questions instead of answering them. Closer "Into The Sun" is a clear example of the Celtic harp being used to pose unanswerable questions. Hunter sings about how she "doesn't know the ending," and a searching harp progression floats towards the unknown. It's a throwback to the stripped-back approach she took on Spells. Most of the time, though, the harps on Lovegaze take a backseat to the other instruments. Tracks like "Garden," with its cascading violins or "Adorned," composed of wispy Nicholas Britell-esque brass, unfold like clandestine spells, hushed and secretive at the start only to blossom into lush collages of classical instrumentation by the end. When electronic textures are introduced, like on the crystalline sheen on "000" or the trap-infused, Kelela-adjacent bounce of "Finding Mirrors," Hunter adapts well with elongated vocals and infectious melodies that call and respond to the production.
The album also addresses the differences between loving and possessing, in both romantic and environmental contexts. On "Finding Mirrors," she interrogates a lover's choice to hide from the connection that comes with surrendering to love: "Why more when you want less? / Eyes down at your own desk." It's this absence of love, she would argue, that creates the urge to exploit other people and the natural world. Meanwhile, Hunter chooses to feel it all. "While I was writing Lovegaze, I was thinking about humanity's propensity to destroy the things we love," she writes in her online bio—so much so that she was in tears while recording "Adorned." Over sustained, gloomy chords, she sings in disbelief at the darkness surrounding her, painting images of the natural world being "torn and broken apart."
Still, Hunter takes moments to appreciate this sheer, if injured, beauty. On "Cloudbreath," a purely instrumental cut inspired by cloud iridescence (a colourful optical phenomenon that occurs when small water droplets scatter the sun's light), the Celtic harp is dispersed among glistening pads and chimes, emulating the sound of light and water intermingling. It's intimate yet all-encompassing, the kind of transfixing soundscape that would trail behind a boat gliding through the sky at dawn.
Lovegaze taps into something deeply organic and ancient, then submerges you in it. It's almost as if Hunter has fashioned herself into a vessel for nature that has been tasked with making a case for its preservation. Her incantations over the title track's chattering percussion and sweeping pads make her sound as if she's an all-knowing spirit not of this world. Moments like this are commonplace and goosebump-inducing—vibrant, dynamic displays that veer towards transcendence. Rife with the yearning for more prevalent love, Lovegaze is a bewitching offering of psychedelia and astral folk that goes beyond the mind, and peers into the soul of a distinct talent as she exalts beauty in its rawest forms.
Tracklist01. Strange Delights
02. Through The Din
03. Finding Mirrors
04. 000
05. Lovegaze
06. Bleed
07. Adorned
08. Cloudbreath
09. Garden
10. Into The Sun