The new album from Tamara Lindeman, owner of The Weather Station project, has the elements to make it one of the most acclaimed releases of 2025: captivating melodies, interesting rhythmic structures, attention to details and a remarkable freedom of expression. As the Canadian musician said: “..the ideas for Humanhood started in 2023 during a personal crisis and a moment of frailty”. She started to think about songs that could represent the path from confusion to balance, from suffering to quietness; to do so she imagined something more elaborated and kaleidoscopic than the previous Who Is It That I should Look At The Stars (2023) which was mainly made of piano songs. The talented musician wanted to compose songs with a high impact to give the chance to live swirling emotions: the alt-folk attitude should be integrated by pop and authorial spirit.
The result is Humanhood, out for Fat Possum Records and produced with Marcus Paquin, in which she received a strong contribution by the musicians involved: Ben Boye (keyboards), Kieran Adams (drums), Philippe Melanson (percussions) and Ben Whiteley (bass guitar).
It is very easy to be wrapped by the warm atmosphere created by Tamara and the album is not only a palette of different and flamboyant colors but also a place in which to recognize emotions and our right to be vulnerable and anyway survive (the essence of humanhood). Musically speaking it represents Tamara’s liberation from the ghost of Joni Mitchell, which has always been a little tight for her: The Weather Station broadens the spectrum to that of some brilliant songwriter of our times.
“Neon Signs” is a good example of the approaching to elegant pop structures, in a track that could be compared to the songs of The War On Drugs: a piano melodic line, a fast pace and a bass line to support the whole. Tamara’s voice is delicate and firm: “Never enough in a world without trust, having to rely upon the lightning flash of lust, uh, like it’s almost the same as love”. “Mirror” starts skew with broken beats giving the track the flavour of some harmonies a la Joan As Police Woman. It is an elegant song which opens to an airy refrain describing our expectations becoming illusions: “God is a mirror, everything is, I don’t know why it’s just the way that it is”.
“Body Moves” offers her best in creating an emotional atmosphere with delicate ballads in whose folds to find some answers to the questions that life poses: “Were you lost? How were you blind? Were you trying too hard to be kind?”. “Humanhood” captures the listener for the interweaving of piano, drums and trumpet; it is a track swaying between fragility and drama as only singers like Sharon Van Etten can do, leaving the listener in the hope that it will never end.
Humanhood is the achievement by The Weather Station of a stable place among the best folk songwriters and will give moments of real poetry to everyone who will come close to it.
