What Natasha Khan Does to a Room

Some years just have a particular soundtrack you can’t separate from everything else going on—the rooms, the light, whatever mood the season was carrying. For me 2009 was one of those years. Horehound by The Dead Weather was in constant rotation. So were Hands by Little Boots and Far by Regina Spektor. I have always been drawn to female voices—the range of emotional territory a woman who really knows how to use hers can move through in a single song—and that year it felt like every record I actually needed was coming from exactly that direction.

And then there was Natasha Khan, which is to say Bat For Lashes.

I’d been sold since Daniel—that song still does something to me I can’t entirely explain—but Two Suns as a full album had made it clear she was working at a different altitude. There’s a density to what she makes, a mythological weight that never tips into pretension. She wears all of it—the mysticism, the longing, the strange borrowed imagery—without looking like she’s wearing a costume.

The video for Sleep Alone, her third single, arrived and confirmed all of it. It moves through mist and low light and something that feels borrowed from a half-remembered dream. The song itself is for sitting in the dark with a glass of red wine and no particular place to be—it manufactures its own atmosphere and pulls you in before you’ve decided whether you wanted to go. Music for a specific quality of longing that doesn’t have a name. I love this woman’s work completely, and I don’t think I need a therapist to explain why.