Carrying the Haunted Man
The cover arrives before the music does. Natasha Khan, nude, carrying a naked man across her shoulders—not tenderly, not erotically, but like cargo. Like obligation. It’s an image from a myth that hasn’t been written yet. By the time you get to the album itself, you already know what territory you’re in.
The Haunted Man is Bat For Lashes’ third record, and it’s the one where Khan drops whatever residual diffidence remained in her work and just commits. Fur and Gold had a wispy, folkloric quality—antlers and dream logic. Two Suns was post-breakup and electronic, with a "Pearl" alter-ego holding the more painful material at a slight remove. This one goes more directly at its subject: what it means to carry men. Emotionally, literally, in memory.
The sound is orchestral and dense—strings that arrive with intent, drums that land hard when they land at all. Khan’s voice has always been her main instrument, and here she uses it with full confidence: whispering one moment, building to something that carries the weight of belting without quite tipping into it. The production strips the electronic texture that defined Two Suns and replaces it with something rawer. It’s the kind of record that insists on being played loud, in a room with the lights off.
"All Your Gold," the lead single, is the album in miniature: slow, cathedral-scale, emotionally deliberate. It takes almost two minutes to fully arrive and then just stays. "Marilyn," which uses Monroe and Joe DiMaggio as its canvas, was the track that surprised me most—Khan writing about a historical woman with the same intimate register she’d give a close friend who died young. There’s no analytical distance. She’s inside it.
The album’s argument, if it has one: men are haunted, and women are usually doing the haunting work on their behalf. The cover makes the gender politics explicit—the labor is hers, the dead weight is his—but the record earns that argument rather than just asserting it. There’s tenderness toward the haunted, not only frustration. Khan makes the burden feel chosen rather than resented. Which is either empowering or heartbreaking, depending on your afternoon.
I’ve been returning to Two Suns for three years now—long enough that it’s become a reference point rather than just a record. The Haunted Man doesn’t displace it but adds something different: less about loss being processed, more about a strength that doesn’t ask for recognition. Better than I expected in some ways, exactly what I expected in others. With Bat For Lashes, that’s already a high bar.