Humanhood

The music flits between rock, folk and jazz, providing an emotional experience that is as affecting as anything you are likely to hear in 2025. [Feb 2025, p.43]

‘Humanhood’ is the most full-throated creation from The Weather Station to date. The relief is that they still have something really worth saying, which makes the album an early yardstick for all the releases to follow across the rest of the year.

The sincerity coursing through the song, elevated by the dynamic and rich arrangements, are so immediately effective in drawing you further into a world where its imperfections are highlighted instead of hidden.

The group effort renders Humanhood’s songs lush and circuitous, seemingly propelled by an internal logic that’s being pieced together as you hear it.

It’s an album that, as much as it looks inwards lyrically, is finally just as universal as Weather Station’s climate change-themed breakthrough album Ignorance, a remarkable achievement in itself.

Humanhood finds Lindeman in the middle of the mysterious, sacred process of returning to herself, and while the album may not offer many answers, its rare honesty, eloquence, and compassion make it another triumph for the Weather Station.

The album is lovely. The band as currently constituted has chops, and mixes highly polished songwriting and arrangements with select extemporizations.

The album has an unsettling undercurrent of synths buzzing and swirling with chaotic sounds that never truly recede as Linderman tries to capture the detachment we feel in everyday life. Even the short instrumentals (“Descent”, “Passage”, “Fleuve” and “Aurora”) act as off-putting placeholders, and while some tracks take that disjointedness to extremes, it is a crucial part of Linderman’s message on Humanhood, cutting through the static for true meaning. The artsy-folk stylings would not pack as much of a punch if it weren’t for the fantastic drumming/percussion of Adams and Melanson, who ground/drive the songs forward.

“All I can do is sew it into this undulating thing, whatever it is I’m making with you,” she sings. Whatever that ends up being in the long term, this is the kind of album where such an epiphany feels uniquely earned.

Linderman owes what happened to her with this superbly honed musical novella. [Feb 2025, p.80]

A record of complex emotions and fine-grained nuance. [Jan 2025, p.105]

Those who take the time to unpack and absorb the content will almost certainly find aspects that crawl beneath the skin, but the collection is only as hard-hitting as the listener is receptive to the experience. It’s musically calming like a dusky sky pinpricked with stars, but unforgivingly immediate in its focus, like the underlying promise of thunder.

Humanhood spotlights a restless artist as she strives to reconcile minimalism and maximalism, all the while addressing the mysteries of self, other, and the world.

Humanhood sounds very similar to the Weather Station‘s past few full-length releases. Fans of those albums will find much to appreciate here.