Nina Nastasia

THOUGH Nina Nastasia’s previous six albums quietly mastered the art of subtle devastation, they won’t have prepared listeners for her seventh. The Los Angeles-born singer-songwriter came to cult acclaim in her thirties with her 2000 self-released debut, Dogs, recorded by Steve Albini, who passed a copy on to John Peel. Both became champions of Nastasia’s powerful songwriting: compellingly direct, darkly skewed alt.country which evolved through storms of strings, saw, fiddle and accordion on The Blackened Air and Run To Ruin, via collaboration with the Dirty Three’s ingenious drummer Jim White on You Follow Me, to grand orchestral drama on Outlaster.

In April, Nastasia revealed that her 25-year relationship with her partner and manager, Kennan Gudjonsson, had been marred for most of that time by emotional abuse and control. After she ended it in 2020, he killed himself. Her stark new album, Riderless Horse, unsparingly documents her grief and her survival; “I am ready to live”, she sings in the last moments of its final song.

DOGS

SOCIALIST RECORDS, 2000/TOUCH AND GO, 2004

Songs of subtle and shifting moods that still haunt with their sense of hushed aftermath

I’d been doing music organically, from having a shitty job and being desperate to escape in writing songs, to doing little open mics, then slowly, slowly doing shows in New York City. And then when I met Kennan, he ended up being a kind of producer for all the