Pain Will Polish Me

“Stormy and cathartic dark-pop gems,” wrote Gorilla vs Bear about Jessica Weiss’s early solo work. The voice and songwriter of Fear of Men, she carries that same lyrical precision and emotional intensity into her solo project New German Cinema. It’s been five years in the making, stretched between London and LA, built from late-night files, long silences and the quiet persistence of two people trying to finish something beautiful from opposite ends of the world. Produced with Alex DeGroot (Zola Jesus, Cate Le Bon), it feels both forensic and devotional, the product of someone who doesn’t rush catharsis. Pain Will Polish Me presents both solitary and connective, as if built from long-distance transmissions between two dream states. Weiss calls it a meditation on pop and European art-house auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It tracks the ways intimacy and control fold into one another until it’s impossible to tell where one ends. The songs are about the parts of yourself that dissolve in love, and the small acts of violence that come with being known. They move through claustrophobic relationships, obsession, surrender, cycles of suffering that start to feel like devotion. The language is pop but the feeling is something stranger, colder, more interior. The songs move in shadow. It’s an album about losing yourself in order to see what’s left. A document of love as obsession, repetition, survival. A meditation on love as both mirror and undoing, crafted in fragments, then pieced together into something whole.