Bat For Lashes, aka Natasha Khan, has unveiled her new song, “The Hunger,” from her highly anticipated new album Lost Girls out on September 6 via AWAL Recordings. The video for “The Hunger,” which Khan directed and stars in, is shot in an otherworldly nowhere place, and reveals Khan’s character Nikki Pink’s rise as the head priestess of the Lost Girls, spreading magic and light through a sensual ceremonial performance. A meditation on love, grief, release, and redemption, the video was produced in collaboration with her production company Lief.
Following on from the lush slow burn of “
Kids in the Dark” and the poppered up 80’s rush of “Feel For You”, comes third single ‘The Hunger’: a powerful, mystical anthem, spilling out across five precisely crafted minutes. “I started that song with this organ sound on a really old ’80s synth”, Natasha remembers. “Then (co-writer/ producer) Charles Scott IV brought in his bass, and every time we were adding more and more stuff it was getting closer to this particular feeling that I wanted. There’s nothing like this feeling of translating something that’s in your DNA, part of who you are energetically, coming out in music. Like it matches a thumbprint inside of you.”
Spanning 10 tracks,
Lost Girls sees Khan dreaming up her own fully formed parallel universe, laying tantalizing clues on
social media. If her last album,
The Bride, was melancholy and mournful, a tone poem of loss and regret,
Lost Girls is her mischievous younger sister, widescreen in scope and bursting with Technicolour intensity. It’s an album for driving in the dark; holding hands at sunset; jumping off bridges with vampires; riding your bike across the moon. Within the women of
Lost Girls and her character Nikki Pink, Khan unfolds elements of herself; within these songs, we do the same. Filled with gauzy, 80’s-esque power ballads, Iranian-inspired beats, and the sort of epic sonics reserved for film credits rolling up a screen, Lost Girls is a noir, supernatural night-riding adventure, and one of the finest albums in Khan’s rich, varied discography.
