In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.
It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star — a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired…
Tag Archive: This Is Lorelei
To behold Stonehenge is to bear witness to the human capacity for ingenuity. For songwriter Nate Amos, who records as This Is Lorelei, an encounter with the megalithic structure was life-changing: It convinced him to stop smoking weed.
The prospect of giving up a habit he’d indulged nearly every day for 15 years was daunting, but Amos decided to channel his subsequent restless energy into songwriting. Maybe it was the lack of weed; maybe Amos was building off the recent success of his various other projects; maybe those Neolithic rocks transmitted something magic to him — regardless, the resulting album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is a keenly crafted and wonderfully adventurous set of songs, both earnest and appealingly funny.
As one half of Brooklyn-based duo Water from Your Eyes, Nate Amos makes left-field pop that feels hypermodern: wry, memey lyricism; post-ironic genre-hopping; the kind of jilted chaos and tonal jumble that characterises a social media feed. Yet the band had actually been plugging away for seven years before their 2023 breakthrough.
Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei has been going even longer, only gaining proper traction with last year’s belated debut album Box for Buddy, Box for Star.
Now Amos is capitalising on this recent momentum with another release, this time a compilation of re-recorded songs dredged from his extensive Bandcamp back catalogue. Unlike his WFYE output, these tracks are mainly…
