Southern Lord Recordings

Nadja return with a new album Luminous Rot, incoming on CD and DL formats via Southern Lord on May 21 with the LP version arriving on August 13.  Nadja is a duo of multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff—active since 2005—and making music which can be described as ambient doom, dreamsludge, or metalgaze. Nadja’s signature sound combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial.

For their  new album, Luminous Rot, the duo retain their overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests not only in metal, but post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial.

Watch (+ share) the visualizer for the title track ‘Luminous Rot’ on YouTube. (Also available on Bandcamp + Spotify.)

Thematically, Luminous Rot explores ideas of ‘first contact’ and the difficulties of recognising alien intelligence. This was in part inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui — in particular, theories on astro-physics, multi-dimensionality, and spatial geometry in “The Three Body Problem” — as well as Margaret Wertheim’s “A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space,” about mathematician Daina Taimina’s work with crochet to illustrate hyperbolic space and geometry.

The album was recorded between their home studio, Broken Spine Studios, or Nadja’s live rehearsal studio, both in the district of Lichtenberg, Berlin.  Luminous Rot marks the first album mixed by someone else, who in this case was David Pajo. The band comment, “as big fans of Slint, we thought he might fore-front the more angular, post-punk elements of our music – the mix is quite different from our previous albums. But, as usual, we had James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, etc) master the album as we trust his ears and aesthetic, as he’s mastered numerous records of ours.”

Luminous Rot, Track List:
1. Intro
2. Luminous Rot
3. Cuts On Your Hands
4. Starres
5. Fruiting Bodies
6. Dark Inclusions

“You don’t so much throw on a Nadja album as dunk your head in one; the smoggy haze of fuzz and scuzz that permeates the Berlin-based doom-gaze duo’s albums is so relentless and all-consuming that, after a while, it starts to feel as comforting and commonplace as oxygen…” – Pitchfork

Additional bio:  
Nadja has released numerous albums on many different underground labels—Alien8 Recordings, Daymare Records, Robotic Empire, Hydrahead Records, Gizeh Records, and Important Records, to name a few—including their own imprint, Broken Spine Productions.  

The duo has toured extensively around the world—including performances at such festivals as SXSW, FIMAV, Roadburn, Donaufest, Le Guess Who, Incubate, and Unsound—and sharing stages with the likes of Earth, OM, Khanate, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Godflesh.    

Originally from Toronto, Canada, for the last decade the duo has been based in Berlin, Germany.  

Artist (image by by Janina Gallert)