“There are all kinds of truth, … but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.” Thus Hazel Motes proclaims in Flannery O’Connor’s debut novel, Wise Blood. Motes, a World War II veteran from Tennessee, preaches the Church without Christ, “where the blind don’t see … and what’s dead stays that way.” He embodies the nihilism that O’Connor, a go-for-the-throat Catholic writer who died from Lupus in 1964 at age thirty-nine, confronted in 20th century America. In our own age of “you do you” and “make your own meaning,” the notion of an objective, unifying truth that confers purpose on human existence seems passé and dangerous to many. Yet the specter of such a truth haunts one of 2019’s most critically acclaimed albums, Weyes Blood’s retro-pop masterpiece Titanic Rising. Like her literary namesake, Weyes Blood, whose real name is Natalie Mering, grapples with questions of belief and meaning. O’Connor and Mering share an artistic kinship borne out of the friction between nihilism and hope. They rouse us out of our complacent acceptance of today’s bland materialism.

Raised in a born-again Christian home, Mering renounced the faith of her parents, though it continues to inspire her work. Titanic Rising in name alone suggests resurrection, and then there’s the music—an orchestral synth-pop pastiche that reanimates the dry bones of radio hits from decades past.The album frequently alludes to the Bible and at times seems to address God: “If you think you can save me, I dare you to try,” the speaker challenges with her head tilted to the sky in “Andromeda,” named after the galaxy closest to our own. Her challenge, however, drifts into a seemingly godless universe that holds “nothing … for me except a heart that’s lazy.”

Ennui permeates the speaker’s personal cosmos. It’s the pallid lifeforce feeding the restlessness that has her “running from her own life.” Like Mering, Motes begins as an evangelical. He “converts to nothing instead of to evil” after his fellow soldiers deride him for abstaining from a trip to the brothel. Unmoored from their faith, Motes and Mering seemingly attempt to anchor themselves to something else that promises fulfillment. Motes proselytizes for his Christ-less church after the war, and Titanic Rising offers reflections on the state of romantic love today.

The song “Everyday,” for example,  expresses the fear of being alone, likening modern dating to “sailing on ships to nowhere.” Today’s understanding of love only reinforces a sense of alienation. We seal ourselves off from each other by entrenching ourselves in personal interpretations of love, the song suggests. “Lay down my guy. My love is right. Lay down my guy,” Mering croons in the outro. There may be no God in Titanic Rising, but there are idols. In the Christian tradition, idolatry implies misdirected worship; worship, of course, belongs to God alone, Who is Love. The form an idol takes isn’t as important as what it does to us. Whether it’s a golden calf or an obsession with Cross-Fit, an idol seduces us with the illusion that our opinions and self-interest are sacrosanct.

Under the spell of idolatry in “Everyday,” the speaker commands her guy to prostrate before her love, and strips love of its universal quality. Love isn’t a Who drawing us into communion with Himself and each other. Instead, it’s her private property, an object she holds above another for veneration. Far from being a self-sacrificial act of love, her partner’s submission only feeds her insatiable appetite for cheap intimacy, whether emotional or physical: “I need a love every day,” she declares with full abandonment in the chorus. If the jaunty “Everyday” is a bubbly carousal,  the subsequent, balladic track, “Something to Believe,” is the lonesome hangover. “Nobody’s gonna love you the same way. Some of us go astray. I walk so far from them all,” she pines. Nobody can love as the speaker does because love is her own invention, leading her back to herself, trapping her in an endless search for connection.

Motes’ crusade for nihilism leads him down a destructive path. Toward the end of Wise Blood, an enterprising conman named Hoover Shoats tries to persuade Motes to charge admission into the Church Without Christ. When he refuses, Shoats hires a Motes-look-alike to recruit converts to the “Holy Church Without Christ” for a small fee. Motes follows his double home one night and kills him for two reasons: he’s “a man that ain’t true” and “mocks what is” true. What so deeply offends Motes is a failure to possess and embody a set of convictions, any convictions. Motes and Titanic Rising echo today’s zeitgeist: What’s ultimately important is that we’re true to ourselves, to our own ideas of love, truth, god, fill in the blank. Yet the book and album contain a certain gravity—something or someone pulling Motes and Mering’s speaker outside themselves.

In the final chapter of Wise Blood, Motes persists in his belief that people are better without Christ, but he dies like a medieval Catholic saint. After the murder, he decides to take the gospel of the Church Without Christ to a different city, but his plan fails when a cop rolls his car off a cliff. So Motes, ever the maximalist, blinds himself and wraps barbed wire around his bare torso as penance. What exactly inspires his transformation is left unclear. But one thing is certain: Motes beholds the beatific vision. He merges with a “pin point of light” at the end, and his repentance turns his avaricious landlady into a compassionate caregiver, though he rebuffs her ministrations. The Southern apostle of nihilism communes with the God he so fervently denied.

O’Connor writes in the language of paradox because paradox is the logic of Christianity (the last shall be first, to save your life you must lose it, the meek shall inherit the earth). In this case, a man is saved by a truth he never affirms, but one to which he calmly resigns himself. The final words of Titanic Rising, in the penultimate “Picture Me Better,” betray the same resignation: “Waiting for the call from beyond. Waiting for something with meaning to come through, to come through soon,” Mering sings as if on bended knee. The album has been slowly building toward this quiet moment. In “Mirror Forever,” the speaker discerns the selfish nature of her love: “And I see it so clearly. We play so hard. We love our love,” she admits as if seeing herself instead of others reflected in her idea of love. And in “Wild Times,” she observes that “no one knows just how we could have gotten so far from the truth.”

Something has changed since “Andromeda.”“Picture Me Better” points toward a truth that transcends our world. But it cannot be cajoled or coerced to interface with us. We can only brook our hollow existence until truth breaks into us, though we must first open ourselves to an encounter with it. By doing so, Mering’s speaker experiences an apotheosis of sorts, though it lacks the Catholic character of Motes’. The final track, an instrumental titled “Nearer to Thee” (a reference to the song the Titanic band supposedly played as the ship sank), crests and falls gently with billowing violins that fade after a brief sixty-two seconds. This liquid quality suggests a watery death and thus baptism—a release from the intractable materiality of modernity, an initiation into new life. There are no words because words fail to describe the beyond, which possesses a personal dimension, hinted by the formal pronoun “Thee.”

Of course, Mering is not a character written by a Christian novelist espousing theology in the guise of fiction. In a recent interview withVice, she decried the dogmatic nature of Christianity. But Titanic Rising nonetheless expresses a weariness with today’s relativism and a longing for some notion of truth. O’Connor once remarked, “If you live today, you breathe nihilism.” The same could be said for our own time, but with works of art like Titanic Rising, at least there’s an air advisory in effect. In this way, Mering carries the torch O’Connor left burning so many decades ago.