It’s impossible to separate Nina Nastasia’s first album in 12 years from its tumultuous backstory. On 26 January 2020, she finally left an abusive 25-year relationship with her manager and collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson. The following day he took his own life. Those events don’t so much cast a shadow over Riderless Horse, written and recorded in the aftermath, as permeate every second of it. It’s an unsettlingly raw album, the sparse instrumentation – Nastasia’s soft voice and acoustic guitar, recorded, as ever, by Steve Albini – making her lyrics all the more stark and powerful.
The songs plot the relationship’s narrative arc, its fitful highs and crushing lows, unflinchingly charting domestic violence (This Is Love; Nature), but also recognising those fleeting moments of love and optimism (Blind As Batsies). Ask Me details her decision to leave (“I’ll be the one to choose life over illness/ To be born from this deadness and leave”) and makes no attempt to mask her conflicting emotions. It ends with Afterwards, and there’s something redemptive in her closing lines, as Nastasia looks back and recognises that she’s made it through: “I want to live/ I’m ready to live”. It’s a heartening coda to an astonishingly moving record.
