Marissa Nadler
Biography
Marissa Nadler is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist and visual artist raised in Needham, Massachusetts, and based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her music draws on folk and americana, with fingerpicked guitar, layered vocals and atmospheric arrangements often described as dream folk or gothic folk. Her songs bring together personal experiences, fictional characters and historical stories.
Nadler studied at the Rhode Island School of Design while developing her music, releasing her debut album, Ballads of Living and Dying, in 2004. She later established her own label, Box of Cedar Records, through which she released Marissa Nadler (2011) and its companion, The Sister (2012).
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July (2014) began her recording partnership with Sacred Bones Records and Bella Union. Her first album with producer Randall Dunn, it surrounded her voice and guitar with strings, synthesizers and additional guitar arrangements. Strangers (2016) explored fictional lives and imagined settings, while For My Crimes (2018) focused on the strains of maintaining relationships through distance and change.
Her collaborations include work with John Cale, Xasthur and Mary Lattimore. In 2019, she and Stephen Brodsky released Droneflower, a joint songwriting project developed outside their respective solo and band work.
Nadler took on sole production duties for The Path of the Clouds (2021), writing many of its songs on piano and experimenting with synthesizers and distorted guitars. Stories of disappearances and escapes, including cases featured on Unsolved Mysteries, provided material for its lyrics. Additional songs from the sessions appeared on The Wrath of the Clouds (2022).
New Radiations was released on August 15, 2025. Produced by Nadler and mixed by Dunn, it combined vocal harmonies and fingerpicked guitar with arrangements by longtime collaborator Milky Burgess. Her visual work also accompanies her recordings: she painted the cover of For My Crimes and created the music videos for New Radiations.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.