A string quartet would not be out of place there, and that day Mering had brought one in. Inside, it was as cool and dim as a bank vault. The Beach Boys made “Pet Sounds” there EastWest is where the Mamas and the Papas recorded “California Dreamin’ ” and “Monday, Monday.” The ceilings were high, the equipment sumptuous. The building, from 1933, had once been a burlesque joint called Madame Zucca’s Hollywood Casino and had been taken over in the early sixties by Bill Putnam, the pioneering audio engineer known for inventing many modern recording techniques. Mering half-jokingly described the record to me as “a doomer classic.”ĮastWest, which is on Sunset Boulevard, was the fanciest place Mering had ever recorded. The album, her fourth, was her breakthrough, critically acclaimed for the imaginative way Mering had recast the Laurel Canyon folk-pop of the nineteen-seventies for a new era of existential unease. It was a nostalgic image rendered deeply eerie. For the cover of “Titanic Rising,” Mering had an elaborate re-creation of her teen-age bedroom submerged in a back-yard pool, and was photographed underwater, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The album, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” which comes out on November 18th, is her first since “Titanic Rising,” in 2019.

One afternoon in June of last year, Natalie Mering, the indie musician who performs as Weyes Blood, was working on a new album at EastWest, a storied recording studio in Hollywood.

Soft rock instrumental music