Video: Nite Jewel, ‘This Time’

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Nite Jewel (Photo by Tammy Nguyen)

Nite Jewel’s forthcoming fifth album, “No Sun,” is a breakup album informed not only by songwriter Ramona Gonzalez’s own experience but by the history of breakup albums. Or, in a broader sense, women’s voices as sonic vessels for pain.

The album, her first since 2017’s “Real High,” has its roots in the 2018 dissolution of Gonzalez’s marriage to Cole Marsden Greif-Neill (aka Cole M.G.N.). About that time, she began work on her doctorate in musicology at UCLA, undertaking research on women’s musical lament practices dating back to ancient Greece and considering the phenomenon in the context of modern pop. She wondered: What does it mean to be a professional mourner?” To be a woman hired as an emotional vessel for a historically male composer? The “No Sun” album announcement explains that her research weighed the creative power of singers, arguing that while often seen as visceral performers alone, these women are agents in their own right.

On the album, surrounded by her typically soundscapish Moog, she is creator and vessel. The first single, “This Time,” is an ’80s-styled power ballad that builds to anguished squalor at the end. It’s brought to life in the video directed by Anna Stypko, with vignettes that suggest crippling grief makes the world go by in slow motion.

The album is out Aug. 27 via Gloriette Records, and a portion of its proceeds will be donated to The World Stage.

||| Watch: The video for “Next Time”

||| Live: Nite Jewel will perform at Zebulon on Aug. 27.

||| Previously: “On Your Own,” “Had to Let Me Go,” “2 Good 2 Be True,” “Boo Hoo”