The Weight and the Water: Navigating Grief in Titanic Rising
Grief echoes as a human experience that tethers the work of art. Hanif Abdurraqip falls under the calibre of the many artists tending to the experience, and he writes: “Grief makes a home within us if we allow it to.” Perhaps we can see art as a way of finding peace with grief, and the processes of creation bear a spiritual significance. Their finished result– whether as books, film and music– emerge as testimonies of living and surviving grief, standing as articulations of the process of drowning in, and being swallowed whole by it. They do not always promise resolution, but they show us the process: of being drowned, swallowed, and, at times, carried by grief.
Weyes Blood (Natalie Mering) emerges as one such artist who takes on the immense task of capturing grief in her 2019 album Titanic Rising. The title itself evokes catastrophe, drawing a parallel between personal loss and historical tragedy. Mering positions herself, not unlike Rose from Titanic, as the central voice of a love story shaped by sorrow. The album explores grief through the lens of failed modern love, climate anxiety, technological alienation, and the quiet ache of living in a fractured world. It is, above all, an expression of faith—faith in feeling, in art, and in the possibility of survival. “I want to make sure everybody feels like they deserve to be alive,” Mering once said in an interview. “I hope you could have a smile during the apocalypse.”
The process of making peace with grief is turbulent, and Titanic Rising mirrors this. Its tracklist guides the listener through the spirals, ascents, and sinking sensations of sorrow. The album opens with“A Lot’s Gonna Change,” “Andromeda,” “Everyday,”and“Something to Believe,”that collectively traces a path from nostalgia and disillusionment toward longing and spiritual searching. These songs carry a temporal ambiguity that is embedded into the processes of grievances, and counters the belief that it is a linear experience. We can hear Mering longing to become her past self, and attempts to make peace with the brokenness of modern life whilst reckoning with hope for a future. These tracks blend sweeping instrumentals that are an ode to the gospel, church-like choir with intimate lyricism, evoking the dreadful warmth of the Carpenters and the introspective songwriting of 70’s folk songwriting.
The second half deepens the emotional terrain, unravelling the complexities of grief with greater intensity. While a thematic thread persists, the narrative explodes into fractures as Natalie descends into emotional and existential chaos. It begins with an ambient instrumental track called “Titanic Rising” that marks a pause, providing a moment of reflection before further entry into disillusion. “Movies” and “Mirror Forever” dismantles the illusions of romanticism and self-mythology, to which we use as an anchor, a coping mechanism to simply survive our grief. “Wild Time” shifts the consistent focus from personal grief to a collective dread, where Mering muses over the question on living amidst a world that is headed towards its end (i.e. ecological collapse and societal unrest), while “Picture Me Better” returns us to the intimate—a gentle elegy for a friend lost to suicide. The final track, “Nearer to Thee,” offers a wordless resolution, like the quiet breath after being submerged. Together, these songs don’t resolve grief, but they honor its shape, rhythm, and movement; embodying its capacity to disorient, transform, and eventually lift.
The viscerality of grief becomes an important element of Titanic Rising’s world-building, as it tethers its visual and sonic design and enlivens a language that intimately belongs to Weyes Blood. It presents itself through an iconic album cover: Mering submerged in a teenage bedroom, surrounded by posters, a teddy bear, a stereo, and other familiar objects. Titanic Rising embodies the reality of grief that is situated in the everyday, secret (almost silent) swallow of sorrow. This idea is enlivened through a photoshoot, where Mering relied on production craftsmanship to capture the effect of a wreckage in memory through a set. The team had successfully created a striking image that tends to the in-between in grieving that tethers between the banal and the extraordinary. We can see this through the ways in which Mering was shot, as she stood in the midst of the room and gazed calmly at her audience. Unlike Rose, she doesn’t invite rescue to her tragedy —only demands its recognition. The room that she is submerged in is surreal, yet its effects are through ‘real’ elements, such as: the glimmer of water, the blur of light, the nostalgic chaos of a lived-in space. The play with light suggests the moments of hopefulness amidst grief, as a homage to the spirit that Mering carries in her songs: “I feel like I keep getting better at the “hope” thing, like it’s a muscle I have to exercise.”
This visual metaphor—the floating room, the sunken life—is key to Weyes Blood’s singular approach to grief. Few musicians articulate it as she does: a paradoxical motion of sinking and rising, of weight and buoyancy. The title Titanic Rising itself carries this duality, embodying the idea that even great wreckage can hold beauty and meaning. Perhaps we witness Mering’s integrity in artistic vision, one that is marked by a commitment to depth and coherence. She doesn’t merely gesture at emotion— she fully inhabits it. Her work is a rare synchronicity of sound, image and idea. Here, design is not constricted to the aesthetics and the selling of a ‘brand identity’, but a true enlivening of an emotion — and maybe, a character.
Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising stands as an important meditation on grief, and provides nuance through its sonic and visual language. Natalie Mering offers an invitation to think about grief differently: sorrow isn’t something to escape, but something to witness, to float with. And even in the face of planetary and personal collapse, the album suggests that beauty, memory, and meaning can still rise from the depths. In allowing herself to be submerged, Mering invites us to do the same—to see grief not only as a weight, but also as a tide that carries us somewhere new.
