Marissa Nadler’s ‘New Radiations’ Is One of Her Best » PopMatters
Marissa Nadler’s tenth studio album, New Radiations, is her most raw, stripped-down, and intimate to date. It’s also one of her best.
New Radiations Marissa Nadler Sacred Bones / Bella Union 15 August 2025
Since signing to Sacred Bones a little over a decade ago, Marissa Nadler’s records have grown increasingly lush and grandiose, her heartbreakingly pure soprano and delicate acoustic guitar shining and resplendent against a backdrop of layered guitars, heavy drums, synth, pedal steel guitar, and orchestral instruments – all glowing in a crystal cocoon of dreamy reverb. While impressive and ambitious, this large-format songwriting and production loses some of Nadler‘s magic, glossing over details and nuance in favor of grandiosity and spectacle. These experiments and explorations have yielded vast continents of exceptional music, but none have been necessary. Nadler’s music doesn’t need bells and whistles.
Nadler’s spent the last four years learning about sound engineering and production, giving her a new level of confidence and control in the studio. This confidence has given her a new sense of freedom. No longer beholden to studio musicians and producers to realize her ideas, New Radiations finds Nadler in auteur mode, carving out minimalist chiaroscuros of love and loss over skeletal fingerpicked guitar arrangements.
Intimate and personal, in this instance, doesn’t mean autobiographical and confessional. While much of Nadler’s music is inspired by personal events, she tends to cloak her feelings in narrative and metaphor. In the case of New Radiations, Nadler returns to themes of departure and escape to explore the infinite complexities of decaying relationships. In album opener “It Hits Harder”, she transforms the end of a relationship into a small airplane flight into the mountains, the bird’s eye view providing some much-needed clarity and perspective.
“You Called Her Carmellia” is based on the Motorcycle Mama documentary, a weepy country ballad told from the perspective of the left behind. “Smoke Screen Selene” starts long after the ending of a distant affair, the narrator beginning “I could never go back” in a blank-eyed deadpan. “If It’s an Illusion” translates the new beginnings in the wake of a relationship into a reverie of sunlight and waves.
“Weightless Above the Water” uses the story of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, to conjure the feeling of distance and detachment. The metaphor finds its ultimate expression in the album’s final moment, “Sad Satellite”, a melancholic update on David Bowie‘s “Space Oddity” sans Ground Control, drifting further and further into the nothingness.
Not every song is about leaving and loss, though. “Bad Dreams Summertime” tells a story about an ominous nightmare about a bridge collapsing over a gentle strummed guitar and Alice in Wonderland vocal harmonies. “New Radiations” conjures the liminal landscape of a late-night television show of some former era. “Hatchet Man” is a pitch black murder ballad, the listener made complicit in its acoustic snuff film. It’s chilling stuff, but it’s also almost unbearably gorgeous.
New Radiations may be intimate and personal, but it’s more of a short story collection than a diary. That is to its credit, as it makes the material more universal, more relatable. If someone hasn’t had the experience of watching a relationship dwindle in the rearview, they can still pick it up for its story of female aviators and solo flights, cosmonauts and rocket scientists. It’s also a reminder that women are entirely capable of being conceptual, that they’re as adept at fiction and high concept as confessional emotionality.
It’s also a much-needed reminder that there’s no argument between body, mind, heart, and spirit. It’s an even more necessary reminder that Nadler’s one of the most extraordinary talents currently working in acoustic music. No gimmicks required!