When Viv Albertine was 22 years old, she bought her first electric guitar with money from her recently deceased grandmother—more money than she had ever held in her hand before. The future guitarist of the Slits and the Flowers of Romance had never played a guitar, had never even seen another woman play one. Emboldened by early Sex Pistols shows and Patti Smith’s Horses, she chose to risk it all on a 1969 Les Paul Junior. “Just for a second, the impenetrable iron door that is convention has been pushed open a tiny crack,” Albertine wrote in her 2014 memoir, “And if I’m very quick and very bold, I might just be able to dart through to the other side before it slams shut again.”
Half a century later, a woman wielding an electric guitar is, thankfully, no longer a novelty. Still, hearing Nina Winder-Lind—Swedish singer, songwriter, and member of the Brighton-based band the New Eves—wail, “I played electric guitar for you/For you, my grandmother/And your mother and her mother,” on her song “Foremothers” feels like a reminder of the work that goes into keeping the door propped open. As Winder-Lind’s stormy talk-sung melody unravels, the electric guitar, so often a symbol of stereotypical rock’n’roll machismo, becomes a hand reaching across generations to all the women whose perseverance brought her to the present moment, where she’s shredding like her life—and theirs—depends on it.
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Wild Love, Winder-Lind’s solo debut, is driven by her overwhelming gratitude for each and every sensation available to her. She sounds almost pained while she sings, “Thank God for all that I feel!” on “Headfirst,” letting us know how wide her appreciation extends. Pain, grief, heartbreak—to Winder-Lind, these are not experiences to move on from but to throw one’s entire self into. When a feeling is too big to shoulder on her own, Winder-Lind offers it up to the music she loves. “How do I tell you I love you without saying I love you?” she wonders. “Maybe I put on a record with some old rock’n’roll/Singing over and over, ‘I love you so.’” It’s a thrilling feat for a musician: to become the thing they need, and to share it with whomever else might need it too.
Winder-Lind extends her gratitude, too, to the artists who offered that gift to her, turning inheritance into reinvention. The riff on “Headfirst” lands somewhere between “Marquee Moon” and “Gloria.” Opener “Street Hassle” shares a title with a Lou Reed album and resembles a Milk-Eyed Mender demo that Joanna Newsom time-traveled to play at CBGB in the ’70s. The beginning of “Grandma and Robert De Niro” sounds like Nico covering “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” When Winder-Lind asks, “If Bob Dylan were a woman, would you still love him and post him all over your wall?” it’s in a ragged, nasally rasp that reveals her own fervent reverence for the Bard amid her critique of the double standards around confessional songwriting and unconventional vocal stylings. In each distorted strum of “Foremothers,” there’s an echo of the aforementioned Albertine.
