0.0

0.0

Reader Score

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Genre:

Rock / Folk/Country

Label:

Transgressive

Release Date:

2026

When Viv Albertine was 22 years old, she bought her first electric guitar with money from her recently deceased grandmother—more money than she had ever held in her hand before. The future guitarist of the Slits and the Flowers of Romance had never played a guitar, had never even seen another woman play one. Emboldened by early Sex Pistols shows and Patti Smith’s Horses, she chose to risk it all on a 1969 Les Paul Junior. “Just for a second, the impenetrable iron door that is convention has been pushed open a tiny crack,” Albertine wrote in her 2014 memoir, “And if I’m very quick and very bold, I might just be able to dart through to the other side before it slams shut again.”

Half a century later, a woman wielding an electric guitar is, thankfully, no longer a novelty. Still, hearing Nina Winder-Lind—Swedish singer, songwriter, and member of the Brighton-based band the New Eves—wail, “I played electric guitar for you/For you, my grandmother/And your mother and her mother,” on her song “Foremothers” feels like a reminder of the work that goes into keeping the door propped open. As Winder-Lind’s stormy talk-sung melody unravels, the electric guitar, so often a symbol of stereotypical rock’n’roll machismo, becomes a hand reaching across generations to all the women whose perseverance brought her to the present moment, where she’s shredding like her life—and theirs—depends on it.

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Wild Love, Winder-Lind’s solo debut, is driven by her overwhelming gratitude for each and every sensation available to her. She sounds almost pained while she sings, “Thank God for all that I feel!” on “Headfirst,” letting us know how wide her appreciation extends. Pain, grief, heartbreak—to Winder-Lind, these are not experiences to move on from but to throw one’s entire self into. When a feeling is too big to shoulder on her own, Winder-Lind offers it up to the music she loves. “How do I tell you I love you without saying I love you?” she wonders. “Maybe I put on a record with some old rock’n’roll/Singing over and over, ‘I love you so.’” It’s a thrilling feat for a musician: to become the thing they need, and to share it with whomever else might need it too.

Winder-Lind extends her gratitude, too, to the artists who offered that gift to her, turning inheritance into reinvention. The riff on “Headfirst” lands somewhere between “Marquee Moon” and “Gloria.” Opener “Street Hassle” shares a title with a Lou Reed album and resembles a Milk-Eyed Mender demo that Joanna Newsom time-traveled to play at CBGB in the ’70s. The beginning of “Grandma and Robert De Niro” sounds like Nico covering “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” When Winder-Lind asks, “If Bob Dylan were a woman, would you still love him and post him all over your wall?” it’s in a ragged, nasally rasp that reveals her own fervent reverence for the Bard amid her critique of the double standards around confessional songwriting and unconventional vocal stylings. In each distorted strum of “Foremothers,” there’s an echo of the aforementioned Albertine.

But perhaps Winder-Lind’s most powerful musical alchemy comes from her voice. It’s a textured and complex instrument; each noise that escapes her mouth sounds just as physical as each strike of her guitar, cello, or keys. “Girls” is a prime example, showing what Winder-Lind does best: rooting herself in the sweet spot between sounding primal and painstakingly deliberate. The song’s lyrical formula seems simple, with Winder-Lind rattling off observations about the titular subject that range from humorous (“Girls want to live like monkeys”) to achingly vulnerable (“Girls are lonely on the bus/Girls feel guilt for their lust/Girls eat almost nothing”). But her delivery gives the song its momentum, the twinkling keys and low trombone rumble provide a pebbled foundation against which the hardest of Winder-Lind’s consonants snap as she declares, “Girls can walk on pure starlight/Girls can crack your skull if they like!” Her tremulous vocal melody rolls along like a body down a hill, collecting violin strikes and glockenspiel hits like loose blades of grass.

“Girlhood” has become a pop-cultural fascination in recent years, yet none of those depictions feel as truly ferocious to me as Winder-Lind’s. If there is anything soft about the type of femininity at play, it’s in the breakability of the flesh: sensitive and vulnerable to the drawing of blood, but bearing an innate knowledge of how to scab itself over and keep pushing. Winder-Lind’s list of generalizations fuels her eventual obliteration of the idea that girlhood can be summed up in universals or absolutes, culminating in a break from the song’s third-person lyrical pattern: “I didn’t understand my power,” she sings, hearty but still shaking, “until I completely exploded.”

Explosion, to Winder-Lind, does not mean self-immolation but its direct opposite. She spells this out on “Foremothers,” sobbing, “I am an exploding lily!/And I want to live so badly!” Women of my and Winder-Lind’s generation know firsthand what it’s like to be caught between gratitude for the freedoms we possess that our mothers and grandmothers lacked, fear that the next generation of women may have fewer rights than we do, and knowledge that the work of liberation is never done. When the expectations of womanhood so often call for sacrifice and restriction, and when praise too often leans on notions of a “divine feminine” detached from personhood, Winder-Lind’s depiction of such a voracious femininity is a revelation. It’s life-affirming in the truest sense of the term: It instills in me an overwhelming and aggressive desire to do as much living as possible.

0.0

0.0