Nadja is a duo of multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff—active since 2005—and making music which has been described as ambient doom, dreamsludge, or metalgaze, a signature sound which combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial.
Nadja has released numerous albums on many different underground labels—Alien8 Recordings, Daymare Records, Robotic Empire, Hydrahead Records, Gizeh Records, and Important Records, to name a few—including their own imprint, Broken Spine Productions. The duo has toured extensively around the world—including performances at such festivals as SXSW, FIMAV, Roadburn, Donaufest, Le Guess Who, Incubate, and Unsound—and sharing stages with the likes of Earth, OM, Khanate, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Godflesh. Originally from Toronto, Canada, the duo now resides in Berlin, Germany.
For their new album, Luminous Rot, released in 2021 by Southern Lord Records, the duo retain their signature overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests in post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial.
Thematically, the album is inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui — in particular, theories on astro-physics, multi-dimensionality, and spacial geometry in “The Three Body Problem” — as well as Margaret Wertheim’s “A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space”.
Luminous Rot marks the first album mixed by someone else, who in this case was David Pajo. The band comment, “as big fans of Slint, we thought he might fore-front the more angular, post-punk elements of our music – the mix is quite different from our previous albums. But, as usual, we had James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, etc) master the album as we trust his ears and aesthetic, as he’s mastered numerous records of ours.”