Lovegaze is Nailah Hunter’s Scintillating Meditation on Nature and Resilience

Nailah Hunter has always been fascinated by the fantastical. Her first stop in her musical journey was at church where she—the daughter of a Belizean pastor—rotated on the drums, guitar and in the choir, where she honed her billowing, rich vocal talent. But it’s when she took that talent, and that mystique, to CalArts when she met her musical soulmate: the harp. From Active Child to Nala Sinephro, Joanna Newsom to Mary Lattimore, the harp’s place in today’s alternative world has been reinvigorated; what Nailah Hunter does with it is superb. Drawing from psychedelic traditions, fixations on nature and concerns for the damaging infliction of the gaze, her debut album, Lovegaze, is a cascading exercise—one which celebrates the world which bounces back under the thumb of white, anthropocentric oppression.

Over the past four years, Hunter has built a name for herself composing ambient music with her harp as a centerpiece. On Lovegaze, those ambient impulses are foundational but nowhere near the totality. Hunter assembles the most bewitching elements of soul and folk to create something transfixing, otherworldly and almost New Age in style. Tracks like “Cloudbreath” lean heavily on her ambient background, while others—like “Finding Mirrors”—are more soulful alt-pop songs, demonstrating Hunter’s knack for melody and worldbuilding. While all instrumental, “Cloudbreath” is one of several album high points, as it emphasizes the harp’s higher register and glorious synths—meant to emulate floating in a technicolor celestial space, proving that Hunter won’t leave cosmic ambient behind altogether.

Opener “Strange Delights” is gradual and charming, emerging from foggy piano and lilting vocals into a treatise on resiliency. “Finding Mirrors” is more mournful: Hunter, supported by drum machines and a harp so hazy it sounds supernatural, laments the exhaustion faced under pressure from the extractive gaze as she sings “Don’t wanna fight you, don’t wanna win.” “Through The Din” introduces Hunter’s trip-hop prowess, harnessing the genre’s power to hypnotize alongside her booming, trembling vocals. “000” leans more on twinkling synths and cosmic sensations, and her voice is at its most intense as she sits on the words “sparrow on, billow, yawn.” References to Mary Magdalene root the song in the divine feminine; the title track is monumental, stretching to nearly five minutes, elaborating more on the power of looking.

Hunter’s focus on power in gazing comes to a devastating head on “Adorned,” where she considers how ancient ruins represent beloved shelters left to rot yet still radiate a beauty all their own. “I was crying when I recorded those vocals,” she elaborated, “I was thinking about humanity’s propensity to destroy the things we love.” She follows it up with “Bleed,” a moment of brilliantly textured arpeggiated harp and the album’s thickest, lushest haze cloaking her mighty voice. “Garden” starts off closer to ambient, with little more than an echoing harp and Hunter’s enchanting melodies, soulful as a whole church choir. “Garden” hovers somewhere between muted industrial and something more earthen, the sound of a heavenly cyborg. Closing track “Into the Sun” is especially uneasy as she reaches into her contralto range, singing “I dream of beheadings / and goose feather bedding on fire.”

Does Nailah Hunter possess the cure for the pain she’s endured and witnessed others endure beneath the extractive gaze of our white male-dominated consumerist system? No, but she is a brilliant recorder of its resistance and a celebrator of the beauty such a system ignores in service of its own perpetuation. Lovegaze is one part soothing balm, another part great awakening about the horrors inflicted top-down in this age of anthropocentricity and the forced resilience the world has learned. Using the tools of mythmaking and psychedelia, Hunter’s vocals and harp-playing are breathtaking, levitating and shimmering in the sky like aurora borealis. Lovegaze represents a strong departure from Hunter’s origin as a composer of ambient soundscapes, but she retains one foot in the genre to help draw the spectral shapes she weaves into an arresting display of folksy alternative soul. It’s a brilliant next step into the intersection between alt-pop and New Age, offering an over-the-top spiritual experience with enlightening reflections on the power to crush and regenerate.

Devon Chodzin is a critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Daily, Slumber Mag and more. He is currently a student in Philadelphia. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.