It’s a Philly homecoming for Weyes Blood, who’s playing two shows at Union Transfer

Natalie Mering, who performs as Weyes Blood, makes lustrous music with an undercurrent of anxiety lurking beneath the beautiful surface.

On her 2019 album Titanic Rising, love songs are complicated by the fear of coming climate catastrophe. Mering is pictured underwater in her teenage bedroom on the album cover.

Her new album, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, came out in November and won Mering wide acclaim and deserved inclusion on lots of year-end best-of lists.

The songs, which were written during the COVID-19 lockdown, conjure singer-songwriter sounds of 1970s Los Angeles while exploring alienation in the social media age.

“Living in the wake of overwhelming changes, we’ve all become strangers,” she sings on “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” the album’s gorgeous opener. “Even to ourselves.”

Mering spoke via Zoom in an interview between a run of concerts in Europe and the start of her In Holy Flux U.S. tour, which brings her to Union Transfer on Tuesday and Wednesday. (The first show is sold out; tickets remain for the second.)

She lives in Los Angeles, which she calls “the world’s loneliest city” on And In The Darkness’ “The Worst Is Done.” The Philly shows will be a homecoming.

That’s because Weyes Blood — a name inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood — was born in Bucks County.

Mering, 34, lived in Doylestown “from the time I was 10 or 11″ until graduating from Central Bucks West High School. Her family moved to Pennsylvania after her father, Sumner Mering, who fronted the New Wave era band Sumner, gave up his music career and became a Pentecostal born-again Christian.

(In California, her father also briefly dated a singer Mering is frequently compared to: Joni Mitchell. “That was something my mom would brag about,” Mering says. “She was the bigger Joni fan in the house.”)

“I always loved music,” says Mering. “I played piano and guitar when I was a kid. But as far as playing music, it was really going to punk shows in Bucks County and working at this record store, Siren Records. Converge and all these popular hardcore bands would play in my middle school cafeteria [at Lenape Middle School].”

Mering’s mother, Pamela, is also a musician, and her parents didn’t discourage her from secular music making “though I don’t think they thought hardcore music and people screaming was a good thing.”

At 13, she was booking underground all-age shows in Bucks County and taking the train to Philly to R5 Productions shows at the First Unitarian Church and Danger Danger Gallery.

In a sense, music became her religion. “I would go to shows every week, like attending a service,” she says. “It was easy to transition from being a church kid to a show promoter obsessed with DIY stuff. The two draw a lot of similar parallels, congregating over angst and dystopian vibes vs., you know, Jesus.”

In O’Connor’s disquieting Wise Blood, the hero, preacher Hazel Motes, founded the Church of Christ without Christ. Mering started using the moniker at 15, changing the spelling after Greg Weeks of Philly freak-folk band Espers told her about a 1980s band of the same name.

Mering moved to Portland, Ore., to go to Lewis & Clark College but dropped out after a year.

Back in Philly, she lived on Parrish Street in the Art Museum area and played shows. “I was very into John Cale and the Velvet Underground and the dronier side of songwriting.” Her debut, The Outside Room, came out on Not Not Fun Records in 2011.

“Philadelphia is one of the most underrated, magical cities in the world,” she says. “Having a coming of age there was just so explosive and fun. Just the amount of different cultures I was exposed to, from one block to another. I worked at an Ethiopian restaurant, I did stuff with Food Not Bombs. Philly has such a deep history of art and activism and weird stuff. It’s just a special place.”

The turning point in her career came at a Philly warehouse show in 2013.

“I played this thing called the International Noise Conference, and the speakers caught fire. I remember thinking: Nothing good is coming from this.”

“The experimental noise scene had become very conformist.” She came to realize, “I was just better at making beautiful music. ... I actually sang better and played songs better than I did scream and roll around the floor.”

The influence of ‘70s songwriters like Harry Nilsson and Judee Sill came out with her 2016 album Front Row Seat To Earth.

“I was raised on so much classical music and Tin Pan Alley that the art of songwriting, for me, has become just as important as experimenting sonically.”

Reaching out rather than confronting the audience — “I alway think about how Kurt Cobain wanted his CDs to get sold at Walmart” — has brought Mering high profile connections.

She sang backup on Mitchell’s “For Free” on Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over The Country Club, and covered Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good” Linda Ronstadt-style on the Minions: Rise of Gru soundtrack. In “a real full circle moment,” she collaborated with Cale on ”The Story of Blood” on the VU founder’s new Mercy.

Mering’s seriousness masks a subversive sense of humor. The playful video for “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” is a Gene Kelly homage. She dances with an animated figure, as Kelly did in Anchors Aweigh in 1945. The difference is that Mering’s partner is an animated cell phone that attacks its victims and leaves dead bodies scattered in a Los Angeles theater.

That’s the sort of subversion that Mering is aiming for with Weyes Blood; aiming to use “the vessel of FM gold radio and have that wonderful songwriting be a secret Trojan horse” that hides “weird noises and experimental tendencies in packaging that’s more palatable. Like sugar to help the medicine go down.”

Mering says it’s inevitable that she’ll release another noise-rock album. But her next move is to complete the trilogy that began with Titanic Rising.

“I’ve been writing it. I don’t know what words to use to describe it because I don’t want to jinx it,” she says, “but I do feel like And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow was like this purgatory of worlds that’s very reflective and internal. The next record is going to be a little bit more extroverted. And a little more hopeful.”