How to honor women? Nina Winder-Lind, the Swedish songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, follows that exact question throughout her debut album, Wild Love. Comprised of songs so ephemeral that they refute their own existence, as if they had emerged ex nihilo and could disappear again. Like an interlocutor, Winder-Lind listens to her ancestors’ tales, tracing a lineage from them to her to the past she will become to someone else.
When performing as a member of the Brighton-based, post-punk band the New Eves, Winder-Lind inveighs against a patriarchal society, backed by three other steadfast Eves. What you will hear is her guttural, quivering vibrato reverberating over a bowed cello, played with such verve and stridency it could be the rumbling of earth—or time falling on listeners’ heads like bricks.
The obstreperous New Eves are indebted to the post-punk bands of the late 1970s. Yet behind their rage is a spiritual longing and a daring playfulness. Their supposed naivety is a formidable conviction, which is to say, innocence overpowering experience, negation overpowering nihilism—think the Raincoats.
Undoubtedly, Winder-Lind is an indomitable force, an artist with a potent vision and a lot to say, as curious about history as about the future. Following in the footsteps of Patti Smith, Winder-Lind’s spiritual predilections extend themselves to a prophetic vision: a bard who goes from past to present, present to past, as if it were a flick of a switch; spouting eternal truths as if they were lifted from an anchoress’ bedroom wall. What else? She searches for God as casually as one fumbles around for loose change in their pockets.
With Wild Love, Winder-Lind has produced a distinctive, art-rock album. Whereas the New Eves render rock ‘n’ roll through their paganistic folk vision, Wild Love is a classicist take on the aforementioned genre, complete with pop structures (scintillating choruses and bridges) and nods to girl groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Who said the Marvelettes were finished? Lyrically, too, there is a large shift towards introspection, with an emphasis on love and relationships.
What’s with the name of the opening track “Street Hassle”? Of course, it alludes to the titular track of Lou Reed‘s eighth studio album Street Hassle (1978). The reason? Who knows? Yet there is an irony when the bowed cello in the second track, “Girls”, echoes Reed’s piece; in any case, the opening foregrounds the record’s theme: how girls are told to be docile and submissive.
The LP burns with an intensity that cannot be appeased; no two ways about it. Winder-Lind demands you take stock, to listen, to feel because it might be an old story, but it must be told again with greater venom and vengeance. In her world, fury signifies everything. “Girls want to play guitar,” Nina Winder-Lind wails in the chamber pop “Girls”, as if the fact has never been hollered before to the point that she becomes emboldened by the fact. So much so that she spits the words like poison darts in the countenance of every man who has said no.
It is Winder-Lind’s fascination with others’ stories, as well as her sense of place in time and history, that makes this record enthralling. Moreover, it is a visceral LP replete with sinuous pop melodies and stately arrangements, all of which teeter on the brink of destruction or revelation, as if the singer is pushing the limits of consciousness, as in Arthur Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses”. Running parallel to this is a proto-punk energy akin to Television; the angular guitar in “Headfirst” could be Tom Verlaine’s noodling until it switches to a solo evoking the Loaded-era Velvet Underground.
Conversely, Wild Love is peppered with refined, baroque embellishments, bolstered by recorders, cellos, piano, trombones, and bass. The piano-led ballad “Grandma & Robert De Niro” is beguilingly quaint. “Would you like Dylan if he were a woman?”, Nina Winder-Lind intones, leaving the question swirling like colors in the air.
The strength of Wild Love particularly lies in the second half: if that is the beautiful, drone-like “HYMN”, in which the singer repeats a mantra of “I Love You” as if she is confessing a crime, or “You’re Not an Angel”, where the chorus takes off like a plane, complete with a blaring horn and whirling, wordless moans as if heaping a malediction.
The drama of the LP is also in Winder-Lind’s Nico-esque, sonorous voice, in which she draws out words as if to see where the sound will take her, as if the sound is its meaning, or if she can subvert its meaning by elongation. Conversely, she breaks words like promises.
“Love You So” hits you with a supple doo-wop transition in the coda. You’d be right to think this is the Chantels—if the Chantels were angrier and wilder, singing in the tongues of terrible angels. It is as if you are hearing a classic for the first time—not out of a sense of nostalgia but a forceful reckoning with the future that makes the past anew. Yeah, Winder-Lind throws rock ‘n’ roll idioms at you like a deck of cards, revealing your fate and for you to pick them up.
“Foremothers”, the last track, is the summation of Wild Love. Here, Winder-Lind grabs hold of her theme—honoring women of the past and the future—and delivers it with such tour de force that you wonder if she really is a seer. The song builds towards an explosive crescendo, where a Neil Young-esque soaring guitar solo bends notes like light; the playing merges past, present, and future. Winder-Lind runs and knocks eternity down without losing breath or hope.
By listening to progenitors, Nina Winder-Lind feels her own existence, her own body, her own possibilities. The fact that you feel more alive after listening to the album is a testament to life. Yes, Wild Love is for past and future generations of women, but, equally, it speaks to the now—and for all.