Nite Jewel, No Sun

Written in the wake of the dissolution of her 12-year marriage and while working toward a PhD in musicology, No Sun is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts. This is LA musician, Nite Jewel, aka Los Angeles singer-songwriter and producer Ramona Gonzalez, first album in four years. Lonely synth lines that beep like EKG machines and stretches of silence guide Gonzalez’s sleek blend of electronic, pop, and jazz music. The album is her most accomplished, arresting work yet.

Gonzalez’s music transports you to a dreamy otherworld, with scuffed backdrops and oblique, guarded lyrics. On earlier Nite Jewel albums, her airy voice was a swooning medium for nostalgic electro-pop filtered through funk and R&B. Her voice was often more a texture than a focal point, which some critics have been quick to charge as a weakness, but on No Sun she changes strategies. Gonzalez’s vocals are front and centre, to emphasize the grief in her lyrics, especially on the standout, seven-minute opener “Anymore.” An oscillating synth beats in the background as Gonzalez sings about losing her sense of self in the aftermath of her breakup. “I wonder if I took over your life/Because it seems you took over mine,” she sings plaintively, her voice growing more delicate as it arrives at a revelation: “It’s no use now to cry/You have yours and I have mine.”

The ballads “Before I Go” and “This Time” present her pain in cut-and-dried terms. “I won’t talk about my feelings if you come around,” she sings in the former over a glimmering synth; “Mm, what’s it about?/You hesitate to touch the water but I’m swimming out.” She lets her words linger afterward, the silence around them like a vacuum.

Even at its most desolate, No Sun allows light through the cracks.