The Weather Station’s Humanhood feels like a body exhaling after holding its breath too long—dense, intimate, and almost unsettling in its vulnerability. Tamara Lindeman has never been one to make surface-level music. Each of her records has peeled back layers of human experience, but Humanhood takes that excavation even deeper. If Ignorance was a poised and shimmering reflection on climate grief and personal fragility, Humanhood is a rawer, more immediate confrontation with the self—fractured, confused, and yearning for reconnection.

This is an album that doesn’t offer easy entry points. It resists simplicity. From the opening notes of Descent, there’s an immediate sense of being submerged in something murky yet magnetic. The brief instrumental piece is sparse but unsettling, like stepping into a dimly lit room with familiar but obscured shapes. Then comes Neon Signs, where Lindeman’s voice floats just above layers of flickering keys and wind instruments. It’s delicate without being fragile—a voice searching for purchase in a world that seems to shift beneath her feet. She sings about transactional relationships and how we contort ourselves to be seen, yet the instrumentation seems to question whether visibility is worth pursuing. It’s disorienting, but that’s the point.

Lindeman has always had a careful hand with arrangements, but she lets things get a little messy here. Not haphazard—just fittingly more human. Her band, now including Ben Boye and Karen Ng, feels woven into the fabric of these songs, and Humanhood thrives on this collective energy. The album was recorded live off the floor, and you can hear it in the way instruments push and pull against each other. Drummer Kieran Adams lays down beats that are both intricate and loose, merging organic rhythms with programmed textures. Saxophones and clarinets by Ng flutter in and out, sometimes like a breeze, sometimes like a storm.

The title track, Humanhood, is where the album crystallizes. Lindeman sings, “Maybe I can get back to my body,” a line that lands like a quiet plea. The song is built around a mix of experimental jazz and folk elements—banjo mingling with synths and horns in a way that feels both grounded and otherworldly. There’s a tension here between presence and absence, between body and mind. It’s a song about disconnection, but it pulses with life, refusing to sink into despair.

Throughout the album, Lindeman seems preoccupied with the idea of embodiment—or the lack thereof. On Body Moves, there’s an anxious energy, as if the music itself is pacing in a small room. “Your body fooled you,” she sings, threading together physicality and emotional uncertainty. The instrumentation mirrors this restlessness: saxophones weave in and out, percussion jitters along without ever fully settling. It’s jazz-adjacent, but not in a traditional sense—more like jazz that’s been fragmented and pieced back together.

Yet, for all its nervous energy, Humanhood knows when to pull back. Ribbon offers a moment of stillness, Lindeman’s voice harmonizing with a soft piano line. It’s one of the album’s more stripped-back moments, and it feels like a much-needed breath. The simplicity is deceptive, though; beneath the surface, there’s a quiet complexity in how the melody unfolds, how each note lingers just a second longer than expected.

Then there’s Irreversible Damage, perhaps the album’s emotional axis. The clarinet cries out, almost human in its desperation. Lindeman never explicitly names the environmental anxieties that hovered over Ignorance, but the undercurrent is still there. The song exists in the space where damage has already been done, and we’re left to sit with the consequences. It’s unsettling, but Lindeman doesn’t offer solutions because there aren’t any. There’s just the weight of knowing.

But Humanhood isn’t without hope. It’s cautious, maybe even reluctant, but it’s there. Lonely is devastating in its honesty, but it’s also tender. Lindeman allows herself—and us—to sit with loneliness without needing to solve it. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that isolation is part of the human condition, but so is connection, eventually. The album closes with Sewing, and it feels like the natural end to this journey. The metaphor of patching things together—too late for perfection, too late to undo the mess—resonates deeply. “All I can do is sew it in,” Lindeman sings, voice steady but soft. It’s not resignation; it’s acceptance. There’s a kind of peace in that.

What’s remarkable about Humanhood is how it balances sonic maximalism with emotional intimacy. The arrangements are expansive, sometimes even chaotic, but Lindeman’s voice keeps everything anchored. She never gets lost in the noise, even when the music threatens to swallow her whole. There’s always that thread of humanity running through it—a steady heartbeat beneath the swirl of sound.

Comparisons to Ignorance are inevitable. That album was a masterclass in restraint and atmosphere. Humanhood feels looser, rougher around the edges. It’s not as polished, but it’s more visceral. Where Ignorance shimmered, Humanhood smoulders. It may not reach the same peaks, but it digs deeper, trading elegance for rawness.

This isn’t a record that reveals itself quickly. It asks for patience. It’s dense, sometimes even difficult, but it’s also deeply rewarding. Lindeman doesn’t hand over easy answers or tidy resolutions. She invites us into the confusion and discomfort and asks us to sit with it for a while. And in doing so, she offers something profoundly human.

Humanhood isn’t interested in being a perfect album. It’s too restless for that. Too unsettled. But that’s what makes it resonate. It doesn’t feel like an artist presenting a finished product. It feels like someone reaching out, fumbling in the dark, trying to make sense of what it means to be alive right now. And really, isn’t that what we’re all doing?

Humanhood is out on January 17 via NEXT DOOR RECORDS

HUMANHOOD TRACKLIST
1. Descent  
2. Neon Signs
3. Mirror
4. Window
5. Passage
6. Body Moves
7. Ribbon
8. Fleuve
9. Humanhood
10. Irreversible Damage
11. Lonely
12. Aurora
13. Sewing

Watch our previous interview with Tamara Lindeman below:

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