The Weather Station

It takes only 10 seconds for Tamara Lindeman to pull us to the floor on Humanhood, the seventh and most arresting album she has ever made as The Weather Station. “I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy—or just lazy,” she sings at the start of “Neon Signs,” her voice at once a soft whisper to a confidant and a full-throated confession to a crowd. “Why can’t I get off this floor? Think straight anymore?” If you don’t know this feeling, consider yourself blessed, because it seems these days like our true modern malaise, that unbound sense of not knowing how or what it is we’re supposed to contribute to this fractious world, or if we even have the energy or will to try. That disoriented sense is the emotional throughline of Humanhood, written during one of the most difficult periods of Lindeman’s life and rendered with a rock band with improvisational chops just as she began to recover by reckoning with a complicated truth: Sometimes, life simply tries to dismantle us, and we must accept that in order to survive.