NINA WINDER-LIND

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“The kind of base line is that I am alive… I’m so alive and I’m so grateful for that. I get to do all these things and feel all these things and you’re in a body and you get to express yourself and you have to or you’re gonna explode.”

Nina Winder-Lind’s art is defined by her ability to transmit the vivacity and burning joy of life. You feel it in the electrifying ‘Hagstone rock’ of her output with Brighton four-piece, The New Eves, whose acclaimed debut album was one of the most uniquely powerful collections of 2025. It also shines unmistakably and with equal strength on her solo work, which is decidedly more personal but no less defiant.

Following three-track EP, The Spirit is Carnal (2023), and her first poetry collection, Röd Ska Jag Leva (2025), Winder-Lind’s debut solo album, Wild Love, is an ambitious body of work from one of the most enthralling new voices in music today. It spells out a liberatory vision which Winder-Lind refuses to compromise for anyone. Female experience is a consistent theme, with songs paying tribute to ‘foremothers’ and girls alike in a society which, for all its professions of equality, still tries to pigeonhole women as either “Madonna or whore” (as the formulation runs on opener “Street Hassle”). More than this, however, the album is an expression of untrammelled animal energy. In her words, what all her work has in common is its awe at the force of life, the feeling that, “You’re in a body and you get to express yourself and you have to or you’re gonna explode”. On Wild Love, that amounts to a set of songs defined by scalding passion. As Winder-Lind reflects, “They’re all love songs, really”. It takes different forms, “romantic love, love for my family, my friends, love for the landscape”, but at its most essential, this is a record about “intense emotional entanglement with other beings”.

Winder-Lind’s solo output stands complimentary to, but distinct from, her work with The New Eves. There is a natural porosity between the two projects, an overlap of style and themes underlined by contributions from New Eves bandmate Ella Oona Russell on flute, trombone, piano, guitar and characteristic harmonies. Winder-Lind’s approach to making music has also been profoundly emboldened by playing with The New Eves. “We’ve all given each other so much more confidence as writers and performers. I have learned a lot about breaking rules, doing things your own way and trusting your gut”. Yet, as she points out, “Up until now, The New Eves haven’t written explicitly personal songs, they’re kind of worldbuilding from a wider perspective…. whereas the songs on this album are much more personal to me”. In this sense, it feels fitting that Wild Love is also drawn from a more individual constellation of musical influences. These include countercultural icons like Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Buffy Sainte Marie, and Nina Simone, experimental composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass and a lineage of expressive outsiders stretching back from Daniel Johnston to Hildegard of Bingen. Also important are old soul, doo-wop and garage rock singles, anything “bursting with feeling”; a quality which is also abundant across her musical own projects.

Originally conceived as an EP, Wild Love was expanded into a full-length collection with the blessing of Winder-Lind’s label Transgressive. In its current form, the album combines some of her earliest songs with more recent works. That they seamlessly blend together in such a coherent artistic statement is testament to a single-minded artistic identity and the human power which is the prerequisite for all of Winder-Lind’s creations. The songs were recorded across two Bristol studios, one located in the basement of iconic venue The Louisiana, the other in a converted church, an apt pairing for an artist whose own form of spiritual ecstasy can derive as easily from a rock ‘n’ roll record as from anything more traditionally religious. Production comes from trusted collaborator Jack Ogborne (Bingo Fury, The Cindys) – who also co-produced ‘The New Eve Is Rising’ – while Winder-Lind is backed by her usual live band of Russell, Finlay Burrows (also part of The Cindys), Edward Deeney (fka Woody Green) and Toma Sapir, as well as a guest contribution from Francesca Brierley (heka, Dorothy). The result is immediate and present, intimate but nevertheless capable of capturing the joy of making music with your friends. The latter feeling is best encapsulated for Winder-Lind by the singalong vocals that close “Love You So”: “Ella and Finlay and me singing doo-wop… that’s just my dream”.

Though she now lives in Brighton, Winder-Lind’s artistic character has also been distinctly shaped by her upbringing in Sweden. Growing up in Stockholm, she often visited family in more rural parts of the country, developing a deep affinity with the natural world which shows up across her work. In that sense, it is fitting that Winder-Lind cultivated her distinctive vocal style – which pervades Wild Love with its passionate bite, enthralling vibrato and devastating command of tone – on long riverside walks, where the rush of the water provided the necessary cover for adolescent attempts to “really really go for it”. Later on, however, after a discouraging three years studying at a classical music college in Stockholm, Winder-Lind wanted to move somewhere she could be immersed in a music scene more suited to her own artistic temperament. While she initially toyed with a move to New York, Brighton seemed a suitable compromise, a little closer to home and host to strong musical and activist communities.  Immersing herself in the city’s scene, she cultivated her idiosyncratic musical approach, refusing to be “held back by convention” as she was at music school.

Central to this album’s sense of uncompromising empowerment is the electric guitar. Not only does it distinguish these songs from Winder-Lind’s New Eves material – which is mostly based around the cello – it further serves as a potent lyrical motif. In Winder-Lind’s hands, the instrument becomes a synecdoche for the liberatory potential of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly as envisioned in a feminist context. The guitar’s power is suggested in the manifesto-like “Girls”, while on ‘Foremothers’, it becomes the lightning rod for inspiration drawn from the lineage of women in her family (“I play the electric guitar for you!”). As Winder-Lind explains, her own journey to playing electric was not as straightforward as it might have been if she were a boy, given she did not receive the same encouragement toward the instrument at a young age as male peers. Even at college, she was directed to a teacher who had her stuck playing “Blackbird” on an acoustic for weeks on end. It was in Brighton that she first got to properly mess around on an electric. She still remembers the wild living room jam with one-time bandmate Daisy Rickman, “I felt like I was levitating, it was crazy”.  In this sense, it feels particularly appropriate that Winder-Lind’s first solo album is heavily driven by guitar-led compositions, whether through the slow dance chord progressions of “You Are Not An Angel” and “Love You So” or “Headfirst”, which buzzes with Television-style angst around her first proper riff.

For her debut album, Nina Winder-Lind brings together the wealth of her experiences and passions and reflects them back outwards, distilled with shimmering intensity. The title, Wild Love, encapsulates the spirit of the record in its optimistic drive at the diverse objects of her devotion and desire. Profound connection to the natural world and an unapologetically unfettered attitude will be familiar motifs to any New Eves fan, but to these are added more personal expressions of romantic and platonic love. Behind it all is the immense vital force that Winder-Lind channels into everything she does. Leaving a searing impression, this record demands that we seize life’s very essence with both hands, and what’s more do so on our own terms.

Photo Credit: Silken Weinberg