Eartheater – Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message

Before music strums in, Malka Moma opens the album with Eartheater’s voice stretched to operatic capacity. Atop a mix of clicking straight from Predator and a folksy orchestral backing, the singer’s voice trills and vibrates in Bulgarian. The song is both an homage to Eartheater’s Eastern Orthodox upbringing and an embodiment of her transition to motherhood. The folk song, which the artist reveals was on her birthing playlist, details a maid’s prayer for romantic love. When she eventually receives it, the prayer switches to one of gratitude.

The lyrics are seemingly traditional: womanhood is attained through the vehicle of romantic love. But, Eartheater subverts this trajectory (which usually ends in blissful domesticity) by maintaining ownership of her sexuality and detailing motherhood as a physically brutal experience. In fact, the song formally rejects its own traditionalism. Typically performed in a large chorus with a lead singer, Eartheater opts instead to be the song’s solo voice, accompanied by a dove cooing and a lulling violin track. This self-centring powerfully shifts the conversation around motherhood from the endless self-sacrifice women are expected to perform to a visceral one about the body.

Paradise Rains is similarly darkly operatic with a layered harmony. The song is somber, the title playing with our impulse to assume that even in an idyllic world, rain ruins perfection. Instead, Eartheater paints paradise as the downpour itself, which “rained on what once was hell.” The song is inspired by the artist’s reacquisition of the family farm she grew up on, the site of her daughter’s conception. With its Orthodox allusions to Heaven and Saint Tikhon, a sonic hymnal quality, and narrative of conception, the song links tragedy with a futurist hope, an Edenic narrative. The conceived child is a symbolic culmination of the past and future. However, Eartheater still emphasises the mother’s body and sexuality with the refrain “The prodigal daughter / Fertile and watered / That night, we made sweet love / And he rang my bell.” The child may be a gift, but the mother is its deliverer–its deliverance. She strips conception of the immaculate, taking ownership of the body through the act of creation.

This ownership, however, is complicated by biology. Practical Amnesia progresses from clicking and a buzzy radio sound into a blend between Eartheater’s harmonic voice and a melodious vocal backing. The lyrics are raw and plainly sung in a way that makes the song feel like confession or beat poetry. Written in the fleetingness of the postpartum and newborn eras, Eartheater describes how her mind quickly began to block out the animal brutality of childbirth, how pregnancy changes the body until it is unrecognisable. Though she’s confronted with the physical evidence of scars and drain pumps and can literally recall the memories, her brain has enacted derealisation. She reveals, “I know it was like ten million wasp stings around my G-string / But in my memory, it was the kiss of a butterfly wing.” The body biologically rejects its own trauma, “It’s a function / So that I might do it again [...] / A funny thing, evolution’s practical amnesia.” The dissonance between body and mind is emphasised by the song’s echoey, haunting sound which the singer’s voice blends into and out of.

Despite the bodily horror, Crown Jewel’s distorted bass cradles Eartheater’s galactic, universal love for her daughter, collapsing the two narratively, again exaggerating the album’s theme of vessels and messages. “All your ancestors like carbon compressed / Into a perfect gem [...] / The earth’s been working up to you since the beginning of time,” she sings. The collapse expands steadily for the rest of the album, with Wasp in the Fig analogising being a mother with how wasps dissolve in inverted flower blossoms to create figs. Additionally, the singer uses esoteric worldbuilding (“Kaisoona moon”) tangled with religious allusion (“To have you in a manger / Perfect little stranger / I used to rule Sodom and Gomorrah before you came”) to create an intangible personal mythology. The surrealist blend of metaphors expresses a transcendent, mystical love between the parent and child that leads to the promise “I’ll never be a sour mum” as a result.

However, Eartheater follows the sentimental song with Glowing Guts, a jolty track with blunt lyricism and the quick beating of hospital machinery. She balances the growing love she has for her child with the physical and mental toil of pregnancy, realised through a literal inability to sing. “Lungs can’t fully inhale / Guts all in my throat / How am I supposed to sing,” Eartheater questions in recitation, rather than melody. The irony of a song with little singing is expanded with an ironic commentary on the Madonna-Whore politics of motherhood. “I can only fuck on my side,” she explains, “Not letting it fuck with my pride.” Though conception is tied to sex, motherhood is often regarded as sacred and therefore asexual, turning women into holy vessels rather than fully-realised humans. The narrative around sex becomes one based on productivity through reproduction, but Eartheater instead emphasises that sexual autonomy and motherhood can (and in fact, do) coexist. Whatever ways motherhood has changed her, she refuses to let it dim the core of her personhood, which is rooted deeply in her sexuality. She asserts this by representing her relationship with her daughter as symbiotic, not one that destroys the mother’s personhood: “Catch myself in the mirror / Heart burning with acid and love.” When looking in the mirror, Eartheater quite literally sees both herself and her child, meaning the love in her heart is ambiguously directed at both. She repeats “Listen to my glowing guts,” until the song’s abrupt end, painting this self-respect and love as crucial, especially given the demanding experience of womanhood.

In Hers Before Hers, Eartheater expands this bodily experience into the past. She reflects on her relationship with her own mother, using her child as a vehicle to explore the way women connect to each other. In the way Eartheater’s body grew her child from itself, so too did Eartheater’s mother grow her (and her mother before hers, endlessly). Hence, the breathless middle portion of the song that repeats “It’s a girl” over and over with different intonations that imply the complex emotions that come with familial relationships. Though rooted in love, they still can create tensions and trauma. “Grew up in a big family,” Eartheater sings, “Too big for the house, busting at the seams.” Though a big family is often associated with traditional values and happiness, the artist here exposes that there is an inherent risk in leaving no space for the individual. This need for individuality is perhaps why Eartheater was always “scandalous” and “blasphemous,” leading to her “Mum’s wrinkles.” Eartheater explains, “nothing my daughter will do / Will shock me / I’m gonna age well.” She consciously decides to end the cycle of gendered repression reinforced by traditionalism, not because her daughter will be ‘well-behaved,’ but by giving her daughter the space for self-expression that she was not afforded growing up.

Don’t Look Back begins with a hopeful, church-like a cappella and transitions into a synth track straight from the 1980s. The song details childhood innocence and hope as crucial for a sustainable future. It collapses past and future, how despite the bleakness of life, there is possibility for change. The song ends on a quiet note with its final lyrics describing the baby: “Two ears curled like question marks / Punctuated with diamond dots.” The song transitions into Favorite, a buzzy, synthy subversion of domestic bliss. “I live for the masochism of motherhood,” Eartheater sings, “There’s no escaping this love.” Babies are endless wells of need, a kind of dictator that mothers must bend to. Though love is evident–with alternating trills of the word–the repetition feels suffocating, like a sonic winding in on itself before ultimately ending on the sound of a distorted record. Children are symbolic of hope for the future, but Eartheater does not ignore that for many women, motherhood can also mean the end of personal freedom.

‘Mother’ is certainly a complicated title to hold, but Eartheater ultimately returns to a definition based on the capacity to love. In the album’s only feature, Eartheater sings with Oklou, a fellow new mom, on Fast Asleep. The song is sweetly quiet, with the floating vocals of a lullaby. “What are you dreaming of, having only been born for a day?” the singers ask, whose vocals layer harmoniously over one another. They sing of wanting to adore their children, “But let sleeping babies sleep [...] / I still miss my baby even when pressed to my chest.” The soft notes of love and a deep spiritual-physical connection fade into Nova, the album’s final song, titled after Eartheater’s daughter. The intergalactic throughline continues, with Nova turning the singer from a star to a nebula. “If I’m the bottle, you’re the message,” Eartheater confirms, “A new kind of love / Nova.” The song ends with about a minute of calm instrumentals that border on lo-fi, tickling listeners’ brains with a lulling concluding melody.

Though Eartheater is known for her alien aesthetic, she is incredibly human and vulnerable in Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message. The album details the alien-esque gore and body horror of pregnancy, a subject only taboo because women are expected to love their children without regard for themselves. Eartheater instead maintains her sense of self, and if anything, strengthens her artistic ethos through the vessel of her daughter. The singer’s love is evident, and the album evokes that in a natural sonic development from her previous works. The album’s trajectory follows the artist from memories of conception into the first hectic months of being a new parent, ultimately ending on the message of unconditional love, for both the child and the self. The album’s quick turnaround, crafted in only six months, is one of its biggest strengths. It condenses intense emotion linked to a very specific time into only eleven songs, yet all differ enough from each other to be distinguishable. The lyrics are brutal and ugly at times, documenting the body as it deforms and misshapes to create another being. But the work’s ultimate throughline is an unyielding, universal love that traverses time and space, continuously recreating itself.