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Nadja — Luminous Rot (Southern Lord)

It says something about how busy Aidan Baker tends to keep himself that a year with only two full-length records and a split single from Nadja, his duo with Leah Buckareff, feels like the band is practically on pause. The highest-proflle of these releases, Luminous Rot, deserves an increased share of the spotlight though, and not just as their first ‘proper’ studio LP since 2018’s Sonnborner. It’s also on a higher-profile record label than many of their releases, as well as being arguably their most conventionally “song-based” work in a while. Although you’d be forgiven for not guessing that latter fact from the three and a half minutes of growling fuzz that makes up the opening “Intro” here. In recent years the heaviest and most melodic aspects of Nadja’s music have not necessarily dovetailed too often, but Luminous Rot soon proves to be an intriguing exception.

As you might begin to guess from the track titles and the vividly red album cover, the album is focused on bodies and decay, layered with subtexts of cancerous growth, desires for unhealthy/biologically impossible closeness, bodily harm (self and others) and other more mysterious afflictions. Whether it’s the more straightforward charge and practically anthemic chorus of the title track or the glowering, roiling clouds of noise of “Cuts on Your Hands,” though, this is still Nadja and so any structural elements are only as important as the sonic atmosphere throughout. Whether the traditional drum machine is ticking along slowly to the almost-Sabbath goes to hell heavy fuzz of “Fruiting Bodies” or the (relatively) quiet/loud/(relatively) quiet build and fall of the closing “Ketene” this is absolutely not Nadja making some sort of conventional rock album. All of the songs on Luminous Rot are still very much informed by the duo’s love of noise, ambience, space, and duration, and the resulting mix is a heady one.

In some ways this is the most straightforwardly doom metal record Nadja have made in a while (compositionally if not conceptually, although the body horror throughout Luminous Rot certainly fits the style well). But it still has a sonic attack and extreme enough structural sense that the genre tag on its own probably doesn’t do enough to sum up what’s going on here. Baker and Buckareff are the rare creators who absolutely locked into their particular sound pretty much immediately and through many (many) releases over the years have never really sounded like anything but Nadja, and yet within that distinct soundworld they continue to find new shades in what in lesser hands would be a pretty limited palette. In the case of Luminous Rot those shades are mostly the bright reds of blood being shed.

Ian Mathers

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