Marissa Nadler – New Radiations
Marissa Nadler announces her new album, New Radiations, out August 15th on Sacred Bones, with a video for the title track, “New Radiations.”
Last we heard from Marissa Nadler, she was soaring through The Path of the Clouds (2021) and its companion EP, The Wrath of the Clouds (2022). Now, on her tenth official full length record, she returns with a raw, intimate, and breathtaking collection of eleven otherworldly songs.
From the first note, Nadler’s lush voice and intricate fingerpicking are front and center. She layers Everly Brothers–style harmonies over dreamlike, lonesome soundscapes— fuzzed-out distortion, Hammond organ, and ominous synthesizers—that elevate her warm vulnerability with texture and atmosphere. Each track unfolds like a vignette of a life lived, delivering emotional weight with the curtain pulled back. Lyrically, she shape-shifts through time and space—inhabiting characters in an airborne Cessna,a spaceship, a getaway car, and alternate dimensions. Her storytelling is cinematic in scope and deeply personal in impact.
On the title track, Nadler intones, “Psychic vibrations and new radiations have taken their toll on me,” a sentiment as timely as it is haunting, as she tries to “break the glass, tie up the ending of the scene.” Reflecting on the track she says: “My narrator (whether these are first person songs or not really depends on how you want to listen to them) is feeling stuck, depressed, and frozen in a world after a tough few years for the world. Regardless, the ‘psychic vibrations and new radiations’ take their toll. The cosmic darkness we live in creeps into the psyche—but the character reaches clarity. As the song unfolds, the screen shatters, the ice breaks, and a new world begins.”
The accompanying self-directed video for “New Radiations” is a richly textured visual world that mirrors the song’s surreal and emotional landscape. Created using a blend of digital and analog film, as well as Nadler’s own paintings, drawings, photographs, and collages, the video weaves together a fragmented, dreamlike narrative. “My aim was to distort space and time into a kind of dreamspace through layered imagery and effects,” Nadler explains. “The video slips between dimensions—surreal landscapes, dissolving faces, collapsing structures, distant explosions, underwater worlds.”
Produced by Nadler herself, the album was recorded in Nashville, both at Haptown Studios with the help of friend Roger Moutenot, and her home studio. Mixed by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), New Radiations features subtle, immersive arrangements from longtime collaborator Milky Burgess—woozyslide guitar, hypnagogic synthesizers, and gritty riffs that ebb and flow with oceanic intensity. In contrast to Nadler’s last two guest heavy records, New Radiations presents a more introspective and personal vision. Genre‑bending yet quintessentially her own, the album freezes the world’s noise in a moment of beauty and solemnity. New Radiations is not just another album—it’s a career highlight, a testament to Marissa Nadler’s singular vision and artistry.
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