The Weather Station

In the fall of 2023, Lindeman gathered six musicians at Canterbury Music Company, where she had recorded Ignorance and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, alongside co-producer Marcus Paquin. Several of these players—drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Philippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley—had worked together but never in this specific arrangement or context. Lindeman, after all, wanted to hear the sudden sparks made by these new encounters, to witness everyone react in real-time to the songs and sketches she supplied.

There were many songs left intentionally unfinished, so that the band could respond to what she was saying, singing, and playing rather than strict forms she had already put around it all. They could join her in the fog and fatigue, then, in the sense of being so disoriented that even being in something as ordinarily unsettling as a mere upside-down seemed aspirational. The playing perfectly captures that sense of vertigo, with hiccupping flutes and cantering drums that suddenly fumble for a way forward, with drifting drones and granulated piano and banjo that search busily for a melody they’ve lost. Other friends eventually added their own bits, like old-time updater Sam Amidon, ace guitarist James Elkington, and textural magus Joseph Shabason. They all drop into these fugues, shaping the hazy unease that is so endemic these days into tangible sound. In the final stage, mixer Joseph Lorge helped make sense of these musical webs through thoughtful listening and deliberation. Rendered as a front-to-back linear journey, the result unfolds as a near-continuous piece of music, with interstitial instrumentals fading into and out of the songs.

Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end. It is rendered in linear fashion, so that we start alongside Lindeman on the floor and slowly try to peel ourselves from it. There’s the spellbinding “Body Moves,” which toggles between an organ-backed hymn and a piece of elastic pop, the endless syncopations moving like a misfiring heart. It’s a song about the way we lie to ourselves and insist everything is OK, even as we’re breaking down from the inside. An anthem of escape, “Window” finds Lindeman actually crawling out of one, trying to find a way to anything that hurts less, that actually feels sustaining. The slashing guitar and spiraling electronics conjure a panic attack, the brain demanding answers. “I can’t explain right now,” she sings in a sudden tumble during one of the album’s most gripping moments, “just that I’m leaving.” Away, forward, better—what other explanations need there be?

Traces of promise emerge slowly across Humanhood. Late in the record, above the near-gamelan rhythm and spiderwebbing guitar that frame the title track, Lindeman goes down to Toronto’s lakeshore and dives in, pulled into the current of reality by the grip of the cold and the sight of cottonwood and vine. Even amid urban landscapes, nature can redirect our focus, remind us that our problems are not limited to our experience. In the song, Lindeman describes a moment of understanding she is doing the best she can—that we all are, really. Sometimes it is enough just to keep one’s head above these choppy waters. There is a hidden and necessary bit of climate change commentary here, too, as Lindeman recognizes that we’re all dealing with ourselves as the world totters near a breaking point. None of it is easy or precedented. In that sense, Humanhood mirrors Ignorance, as we all try to navigate a world disrupted.

And then during “Lonely,” as submerged and forlorn as Humanhood ever sounds, Lindeman paradoxically starts to trace a way toward healing: admitting the old hurt, looking for new connection, and, most of all, walking down to the Tranzac’s Southern Cross Lounge to hear friends play music. “A simple recipe—this medicine, really—that can let anything in,” she sings, her feather-light voice drifting now toward resolve. She’s doing that in real time.

The clearest vow of motion, though, comes with the finale and longest song here, “Sewing.” For Lindeman, the hardest part of this whole ordeal might have been accepting that deeply personal suffering happens, that it is entirely human to feel as if you’re detached from yourself, from your world, from your humanhood. Most of us have been there, maybe all of us. So during “Sewing,” as piano slowly rises over the drums’ gentle trot, we hear her stitch together her life—bad days to good, shattering pain to little triumphs. It all constitutes existence.

Geordie Gordon is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Toronto and raised in Guelph, Ontario, where at the age of 13 he began playing in touring bands. For twenty years, he has toured with acts including Islands, US Girls, Andy Shauf, and The Weather Station. His solo project combines folk, soul, and pop in classic songs with lyrical verses and melodic, explosive hooks. His songs tell stories of coming of age, music community, and queer love. River Round (spring 2026) is his third solo album on Victory Pool Records. On River Round, accompanying his vocals, Gordon plays a small orchestra of instruments, including acoustic and electric six-string and tenor guitars, bass, mandolin, electric mandola, octave mandolin, fiddle, organ, Wurlitzer, Moog, and glockenspiel. His two previous albums are Tambourine (2023) and The Tower (2021).

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