Lacrimorta: The Self-Titled Debut
Lacrimorta is the self-titled debut by Nikoletta Winters. Each song plays like a love letter in an endless book that has been written eternally. The lyricism is heavy as an anchor bearing the weight of burden and is thematically centered on loss, suffering, and anger. The vocals are the warmth of a candle in cold, dark, empty spaces, and the melodies carve trenches in your brain that rivers of blood flow through long after the music has stopped. The sound is built from gothic keys, throbbing bass lines, a rich, diverse, firm base of percussion, and guitars that shred at God-defying speeds as much as they waltz under the moonlight.
Gothic Baroque Sound
“Full-fucking-disclosure, I miss being in an actual band,” Nikoletta said when asked about the noticeable stage presence of Lacrimorta’s sound. “There is nothing, and I mean nothing that is quite like the experience of being in a cacophonous studio with four other people in an effort to write something for the mere purpose of deriving joy out of sound.”
Nikoletta wrote Lacrimorta in a way that it could be played by a band with a harmony and a melody guitar, a bass guitar, drums, vocals, and keys. It was an ambitious and intimate undertaking to play all the instruments herself. She said, “I wanted the album to feel more alive and less clinical” as she moved away from the strong electronic base of her prior musical projects to allow the entire production to breathe a bit more.
“For Lacrimorta I wanted to create a space in which I could fully lean into a gothic baroque sound,” Nikoletta said. The album is ornamented with gothic sounds and is a showcase for contrasts in intensity, solos and harmonies, and layers of flowing melodies, already salient in the heavy opener, “Let There Be Night,” where keys play a melody of an ensuing eternal nightmare, drums pummel, lead guitars tango, rhythm guitars rage, and vocals are sung with dark romanticism.
The songwriting on Lacrimorta is like a chapter in a book, with a beginning, middle, and end. Nikoletta told me when she produces vocally driven music like Lacrimorta she feels songs need a pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge, even if the bridge is a simple rest between two different iterations of the same chorus. This structure provides a sense of predictability, making unexpected events more impactful. A good example is “Let There Be Night” when the atmosphere quiets, the keys take center stage, playing the soundtrack of Earth burning as Nikoletta sings please stay with me, for all eternity, I yearn to dance with you forever, through darkness, fire, and flame against the backdrop of loneliest of lonely piano before a guitar solo erupts, casting us all into the eternal fire.
Nikoletta can unravel seconds into minutes, especially during those pieces of the story where she opens the space, coming down from the mountaintops to settle in the darkness of the valley. On “Moondark Exile,” for example, the song opens, a gothic choir looms against post-modern textures before racing guitars, wailing like a live wire in the rain, seemingly reconstructing oneself out of ash to rise, to carry on simply because one has no choice but to do so. This style of songwriting uses energy to tell a story and is not unlike the dramatics of theatre.
This stylistic choice isn’t going rack up the clicks, and that’s perfectly fine by Nikoletta. She told me music is her religion and “art is magic and must be created with the correct intentions for it to be special.” She said, “Lacrimorta is a somewhat demanding piece of art that will take you into its cold black embrace if you are brave enough to spend some time with it. Lacrimorta is difficult music for difficult people.“
This difficulty is felt when you read the lyrics as the songs play, which will alter your relationship with it forever. Nikoletta said, metaphorically, Lacrimorta is an angry love album about punching waves in a blood ocean, lack of control over those who come and go in our lives, unexpected tragedy, and the surprising, joyful ending of one chapter and beginning of a new one.
Thematically, I most strongly notice the curse of living forever, loss of love eternally, and dancing, dancing now because the moment will soon be gone. On “Let There Be Night,” Nikoletta sings eternally damned not to die and I will not weep as you grow older, and I remain the same with everlasting definitiveness. The lyricism on “Eternal” centers on loss of love, the notion that all the one we love must do is say goodbye to the light, a small sacrifice for eternal love, a sacrifice that never seems to be made in the story Nikoletta tells. The highs and lows in her vocals on “Eternal” embody this tension, tension between hope and pain, light and dark, now and forever, all set to a danceable electronic backdrop. On “Yet Love Will Dream,” the lyricism tells the story of offering everything for someone you love to just stay as she sings, I will burn myself for you, a moment accentuated by atmospheric synths, gothic keys, aching guitar, and a bass line that looms like a figure of inevitability while lovers dance one last time.
Nikoletta told me “Dancing under moonlight with a significant other was the constant image I had in my head throughout the process of writing lyrics for Lacrimorta. Having to see that person “fall away” from my life was also a huge influence on where the lyrical direction went. How dare fate, how dare death, how dare whatever supersubstantial force out there in the universe take away the love that wants to persist inside of me and my heart. Like seriously, I want to feel like a good, happy, well-adjusted person, but the fact of the matter is I’m not. I can’t. I’m constantly dissatisfied with everything, and I’m always searching for enemies in all the right places, except for the one that exists inside of my heart. Lacrimorta the project, and Lacrimorta the album embodies these hard to swallow feelings full stop.”
Dancing is not only a lyrical theme. It’s a musical theme as well. For instance, on “Nocturnal Lucidity (Black Roses and Blood for Red Wine)” the guitar and vocals are perfectly coupled, dancing with each other, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes gently, sometimes with great force, while the bass pulsates like blood pumping through arteries. Similarly, on the wickedly titled “Deathbead Companion,” the layers of melodies in the vocals, the guitars, the keys, all dance, sometimes slowly, graceful, other times angrily, forceful, while the percussion pulsates like glowing embers on the cusp of bursting into flames.
The definitiveness the vocals convey and their tight coupling with the music stems from the way Nikoletta writes lyrics, which is always after the music has been written. She said, “That’s been a constant for me since my early black metal days, even going so far as to write some lyrics the night before I record vocals. I can’t really justify writing lyrics before writing the music. I feel that the best way to get the ‘perfect’ lyrical fit is to engineer the words I sing around the music itself.” Her process of writing lyrics and constructing the vocals involves listening to the instrumental versions of the songs, singing to them, and whatever comes out is the beginning. “Sometimes nonsense comes out, and sometimes the words come easy,” she said. Occasionally, Nikoletta rewrites the lyrics after giving them a try. For instance, the chorus for “Eternal” was changed three times, a song Nikoletta calls the problem child of Lacrimorta, taking the blood pudding. Wordiness is one reason she feels compelled to rewrite lyrics. The have to feel just right.
Nikoletta recorded everything for Lacrimorta in her home in the Sonoran Desert between January and May 2022. She said, “There were no days off. I recorded vocals first, then the music, strings, guitars, whatever live drums were needed, bass, selected keys. I recorded guitar solos last, which oddly enough felt natural, pleasant, and fun this time in comparison to my experience recording solos on PAINSYNC,” Nikoletta’s previous album released in September 2020.
When the recording was complete, she sent the album to XENNON Studios for mastering. Nikoletta said, “I’m very pleased with the way it all turned out. He did a bang up job. XENNON stuck very close to my original vision and that man is a consummate professional and knew exactly how to handle the incredibly frustrating task of working with me.”
Pick your poison when listening to Lacrimorta. Over headphones, the depth of the sound, contrast in intensity, rich layers of instrumentation come to life, and the vast dynamic and textured soundscape can be heard in exquisite detail. On the big stereo, the window-rattling power and weight of the album bears down.
Under Cover of Her Black Wings
The direction for Lacrimorta began around August 2021. Nikoletta was feeling incredibly depressed, restless, and wasn’t sleeping, and she started to go by the nickname, “Nyx,” to protect herself and make interacting with others a bit easier. During this time, she met a man who was curious if she knew the meaning of her nickname. This man turned out to be the author of a book entitled Healing Night, which describes the importance of the goddess of night, Nyx, and her children Thanatos, Erebus, and god of sleep, Hypnos.
Nikoletta said, “After reading that book, a lot of things in my life changed. The vast majority of the music for Lacrimorta was written at this point, but there was a quality about it that didn’t feel right. I needed the universe to open up and give me some sort of concrete symbol, sign, or possible course of action to take with regards to how I should proceed with this music.”
On December 25, Nikoletta took a long walk by herself in the pitch-black darkness of the desert. She said, “I felt something odd. I thought it might’ve been a javalina or some other desert denizen. I definitely felt – movement. And then I heard someone whisper a word just past my left ear. That word was ‘Lacrimorta.’”
It was Nyx, the primordial night goddess who had come into Nikoletta’s life months earlier. She said, “Under the cover of her black wings Nxy had given me the little push I needed to walk out of the desert with a new resolve and purpose.” It is quite fitting Nikoletta closed Lacrimorta with “Nyx,” where chugging bass lines and rhythm guitar, hard rock, darkwave, and goth collide, expressing a sense of renewal, perhaps a nod to those surprising, joyful endings of one chapter as a new one begins
The cover art embodies the goddess Nyx, which Nikoletta designed herself and her long-time collaborator, Gragoth, masterfully executed. She intended to have a Dark Souls / Castlevania feel and, in reference to the final product, “I think that vibe definitely shines through wonderfully.” Nikoletta’s sketch is shown below.
PAINSYNC: The Punctuation Point
Nikoletta Winters is also the visionary behind the post-modern musical project Virtual Intelligence, a project that existed during her physical transition from male to female. Virtual Intelligence was the vehicle she needed during that time, and the last chapter she wrote in that book was the masterfully crafted PAINSYNC, an album of tales of end of days, pain, and love. She said, “The person I was physically when Virtual Intelligence began was a completely different person when PAINSYNC came out. For all intents and purposes, that person is gone. To me, Virtual Intelligence was punctuated with the arrival of PAINSYNC. I couldn’t do another one of those. It would be impossible. That album stands on its own and can’t be replicated in my eyes. I just can’t do it.” Nyx had granted her the gift by speaking the word “Lacrimorta” to her that late winter evening while walking alone in the desert, and so she decided to start anew without erasing her past work.
When Nikoletta set out to write Lacrimorta in October 2020, she thought it would be “PAINSYNC but MORE!,” but she said “after a couple of the songs were in a spot where they were starting to sound like music, I quickly decided that I wanted to take a different approach by fully embracing my Visual Kei roots. Malice Mizer has been a huge part of my life so I took the album in a direction that reinterpreted parts of what they did back in the late 90s.”
Nikoletta drew from Visual Kei, gothic, and symphonic metal influences and set out to create a sound that was classical in scope, but her signature post-modern sound which I describe as cold, damp, and mechanical that is heard on prior releases, such as Blood Red Spiral Eyes and PAINSYNC, still forms a basis for many of the songs on Lacrimorta. PAINSYNC will always stand on its own because of the personal story it tells, which you can read about here. Lacrimorta is its own beast, standing in a territory all its own.