Eartheater's New Album on Motherhood: A Cracked Vase, an Alien Birthing Room, and a $100 Must-Have

Backstage at Bowery Ballroom this July, Eartheater had just wrapped a show and sat down with The FADER. The conversation kicked off with her latest album, Heavenly Body: If I'm The Bottle You're The Message — a record built around the conception, pregnancy, and birth of her first child, where visceral bodily horror collides with something close to divine joy. By the end of the interview, though, she was earnestly recommending a parenting product under $100. That whiplash from the cosmic to the mundane might be the most honest thing about this album.

The cover was art directed by her friend Yasz. Eartheater says the mood board Yasz showed her had almost no contemporary references — just ancient pottery and shadowy, weathered, cracked sculptures. She was immediately drawn to that direction, ultimately settling on a vase mended with visible cracks — what she calls a "wabi-sabi" vessel, one that mirrored her own sense of being "split open and pieced back together." The stage setup echoed the same vessel.

She admits the finished cover ended up evoking unexpected Giger-esque alien imagery. The hand-molded leather headpiece Yasz created came out with a semi-translucent texture that even startled her: "This looks like the alien queen." She says she genuinely felt a "Sigourney Weaver" sci-fi déjà vu in the C-section operating room — a comparison that wasn't intentional, but surfaced only after she looked back at the photos.

The album's rhythmic backbone comes from longtime collaborator Dave Cerminara, who built every drum sound from scratch on modular synths. Eartheater calls it near-"witchcraft," since even Cerminara can't replicate the exact same sound if he tries to recreate an improvisation. For "Crushing," she asked Cerminara for "that '80s mom nostalgia vibe," which led them to the Syncussion drum machine — a unit that shows up all over darkwave and industrial records by acts like Skinny Puppy.

Another concrete collaboration detail: her lullaby with Oklou on "Fast Asleep." The two had known each other for years, maintaining a kind of distant musical friendship, until they gave birth around the same time — that's when it clicked for her that they had to sing something together. What Eartheater specifically wanted was a two-part harmonic duet, not the traditional lead-and-backup vocal setup.

As for "Wasp In The Fig," the inspiration came from fig wasp biology — the female wasp crawls into the fruit, completes pollination, and dies. She reads erotic and divine imagery woven into that process. She draws a parallel to a version of herself she had to say goodbye to before becoming a mother: what she calls a "pretty wild" past chapter of her life, forced still by pregnancy — as if she willingly let that part of herself die, only to be wrapped up and absorbed by warm, moist fruit flesh.

Asked at the end of the interview what's worth buying for new moms under $100, her answer was the Tushbaby — a hip-mounted carrier that works like a built-in shelf for your kid to sit on, with multiple pockets attached. She says she doesn't even carry a diaper bag anymore — passport, wipes, phone, all of it goes in there — and she doesn't need a stroller either, since the kid can hop down whenever they want. "If you know, you know — this thing is genuinely great."