The Weather Station
Humanhood
Release Date: Jan 17, 2025
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Fat Possum Records
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Album Review: Humanhood by The Weather Station
Fairly Good, Based on 7 Critics
Based on rating 5/5
'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.
Based on rating 3.6/5
Weathering the storm To one degree or another, life inevitably takes its toll on us all. There is a time in our lives when something as simple as the luminous blur of streetlights flitting past a car window, or the phosphenes that materialise when you rub your eyelids a little too vigorously could inspire a genuine sense of wonder. It was a time when 'life' meant just existing on a planet in motion, rather than it being a literal full-time job.
Based on rating 7/10
With her new album, Humanhood, Tamara Lindeman, a.k.a. The Weather Station, draws from the textures and lush interplays of 2021's Ignorance while also revisiting the more subdued gestalts of 2022's How Should I Look at the Stars. Incorporating instrumental fadeouts, dissolutions, and truncations, Lindeman forges her most free-flowing, even experimental, album.
Based on rating 1/10
The notes to the Weather Station’s seventh album declare, “This record was performed by six musicians improvising live off the floor in two sessions in late 2023. This band shaped the music indelibly in form, arrangement, mood, and feeling.” In other words, it is not a Tamara Lindeman solo release. Linderman is the lead singer and composer as well as piano, synth, and Mellotron player.
Opinion: Fantastic
It's been four years since Tamara Lindeman enthralled us with her mature odyssey of songwriting ‘Ignorance’. The next year, an album of songs recorded during those same sessions arrived, not quite capturing the same magic as its predecessor. In the world of The Weather Station, balance is everything while also being very fragile indeed.
Opinion: Very Good
The Weather Station's seventh studio album, Humanhood, is prickly and less accessible than the Canadian band's previous work, reflecting their determination to innovate. The group's folk leanings still crop up in their Joni Mitchell-esque melodies, but the sound feels more fleshed out and the production is more layered. Frontwoman Tamara Lindeman sings more forcefully now, and drummer Kieran Adams achieves a rhythmic complexity by integrating live and programmed beats.
Opinion: Excellent
Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, the best way to deal with the problems life throws at us is to remember to stay in the moment. It's an approach captured by Weather Station mainstay Tamara Lindeman on the title track to her seventh album, Humanhood, a song that details diving into Lake Ontario off Toronto and being shocked into a sense of the present. Lindeman has, she realises, been too long "carrying a body that's tired from carrying a mind".
'Humanhood'
is available now