Moon Mother Walk Through Winter And Return With “Meadowlands”
There’s a difference between writing about darkness and having lived inside it.
On “Meadowlands”, Swedish duo Moon Mother don’t aestheticise grief. They sound like they’ve walked through it, sat in it and survived it.
Sara Mehner and Patriec Ahlström have been making music together for over a decade. Moon Mother began back in 2016, but what you hear on this second album is the sound of something reshaped by isolation, health struggles, trauma and long silence. After years of quiet, they resurfaced in 2023 with “She’s A Starry Night”, recorded quickly with borrowed equipment. This time they invested in their own gear, spent the winter of 2024 recording slowly, deliberately, and allowed the songs to become what they needed to be.
You can feel that patience everywhere.
From the opening of “High Houses“, the atmosphere is thick with memory. “I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn”. It doesn’t feel theatrical. It feels documented. The cold light of hallways, the sense of being seen but not saved, the emotional frost that follows.
The tension at the core of the record is what gives it strength.
Sara’s voice is ethereal, melancholic, almost weightless. It hovers with a kind of ancient ache. But Patriec’s guitar refuses serenity. At moments it turns raw, abrasive, almost violent. There are flashes of grunge abrasion beneath the Nordic folk textures. Distortion slicing through softness. That clash between the celestial and the feral is the album’s heartbeat.
The music is dark. Melancholic. Emotionally dense. Yet it is never suffocating. There is catharsis in it.
Listening to “Meadowlands” feels like opening a sealed room inside yourself. It stirs what you thought had settled. It flushes something out. And strangely, it leaves you steadier afterwards.
I’ve travelled through my own darkness. There was a time that felt like the limb of purgatory, suspended, lost between who I was and who I could become. You learn things there. You learn silence. You learn endurance. You learn how long winter can feel.
And you learn that you can come back.
That’s why this album hits. It doesn’t glamorise pain. It acknowledges it. It moves through shame in “It Comes With Shadows” without pretending the shadows vanish. It sits with isolation in “World In A Glass Jar” without surrendering to it. It calls for rooted solidarity in “Be A Forest, Child” instead of collapse. It hears the wild in “Wilderness” beneath the machinery of modern life.
By the time the title track unfolds, language nearly breaks. The soul rages “stay” as night deepens again and again. But then the red sun rises over the Meadowlands. Not dramatically. Just inevitably.
And that inevitability is everything.
Recorded largely at home and later shaped with Hans Olsson at Svenska Grammofonstudion alongside drummer Robert Hall, the production allows space for that emotional weight. Nothing feels rushed. Nothing feels artificially polished. You can hear air between the notes.
“Meadowlands” is not background music. It is a companion for those who have stood in the fire and are still here. It walks through winter. It acknowledges purgatory. And quietly, without spectacle, it insists on morning. And sometimes that quiet insistence is the most powerful sound of all.
Tracklist:
1. High Houses
2. It Comes With Shadows
3. World in a Glass Jar
4. Be a Forest, Child!
5. Wilderness
6. Root Window
7. Meadowlands
8. WindhoverHigh Houses
Down on that street my past self once met the present
What my eyes couldn’t see had left footsteps all over my spine
And it was the fall before a decade of winter
It’s so strange, I was burning but the world has never been more cold
I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn
I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn
Where houses are high, heaven is far away
Every window kept secrets, every hallway a nightmare in LED
As soon as I entered I was in their violence again oh
and I realized I had been for so long, it was already too late
I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn, yeah you did
I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn
I’ve been standing in the fire and all of you just watch me burn
You just watch me burn
I stood in the fire and you all just watched me burn, yeah
