Album Review: Nina Winder-Lind – Wild Love (Transgressive Records)

★★★☆☆

After releasing her single This is Our Life towards the end of April, New Eves’ singer Nina Winder-Lind’s debut solo album is finally here. Winder-Lind is an interesting and at times excellent artist, and Wild Love, contains moments of excellence. 

Winder-Lind’s new album delivers what This is Our Life promised. Like the single, the album evokes Nico and Patti Smith strongly. Some tracks, like Headstrong, lean more into the punky atmosphere, whereas Girls feels more solemn, folky. Ethereal, is probably the word. 

It’s far from a New Eves album, and different even from Winder-Lind’s previous solo work. There are flirtations with humour, for instance. In the track Grandma and Robert De Niro, Winder-Lind experiments with a parodic-somber ballad on Winder-Lind’s ageing grandmother. Humour is a new medium for Winder-Lind and the New Eves in general, and it works well. You’re Not an Angel has the most originality out of any track on the album, the best arc, the best lyrics overall. It’s not immediately impactful in the way that This is Our Life is, presumably hence why that was the single, but it is a fantastic song. Love You So is the most poppy of the tracks, an ode to the era of Franky Valli. If Winder-Lind ever gets tired of experimental poetic folk music, there is a career in 1960s doo-wop. When the Cranes has a lovely ark, a building cadence that rises as the song progresses, taking you on a journey. It is a complete song and works well, similar in ways to You’re Not an Angel. It contrasts strikingly to the final Foremothers, which explodes out of the speakers.

Generally, the album has a nice rhythm, the songs get better as it progresses, and Winder-Lind experiments with different genres and ways of expressing herself. The tempo comes back down again with the penultimate track, When the Cranes, before the final song, Foremothers, seals up the album with a lament on the women who have come before. 

Influence is a natural, and oftentimes welcomed, aspect of music. Lily Allen influenced Kate Nash; Orbital influenced Aphex Twin; there would be no Aguilera and Stefani without Madonna. The list goes on. The same goes with fans – everyone started wearing Parka jackets after Paul Weller’s Mod revival, everyone started wearing Bohemian FC jerseys after Kneecap made republicanism sexy (some would say it’s always been sexy – have you seen Bobby Sands?). 

Winder-Lind seems possibly overly influenced by Patti Smith, as a fan and as an artist. The tracks where she strayed farthest from the punk rock legend were the best, as the listeners are able to hear Winder-Lind’s unique, and not unimpressive, voice and personality permeate through the speakers. An example is Everything is About You, which is excellent. Overall however, I would say there was not enough Winder-Lind in this album. There are also definitely elements where it is clear, through her lyrics, she is not Patti Smith: ‘Girls/want to be pretty. Girls/want to fit it.’ Hardly poet-of-her-generation stuff. Girls is awful, as tracks go.

Winder-Lind’s voice is striking and iconic, in the vein of a folky Liam Gallagher. Unfortunately, and not at all unlike the loud, proud and largely insufferable Mancunian, at times she can sound a little grating. This is especially so in her solo work – when not accompanied by the rest of the New Eves. The opening track, Street Hassle, is a great, almost Vaccines-esque number, but at the high notes you are left wishing Winder-Lind had a few backup singers. I think Street Hassle is an odd choice for the first track generally, as it’s such a distilled Winder-Lind sound, it may have been smarter to start with one of the easier-listening songs, like Love You So, to warm the audience up.

I actually preferred the album on the first run through. The hard-to-listen-to nature of particularly the earlier tracks gets worse with each return, and it can be a struggle to listen through it. The album has many compelling and redeeming qualities to it, but feel like they are missing something – the rest of the band, in my opinion. The lack of the New Eves becomes more and more blatant with each return to the album. Think that spin-off show Joey – even if he was everyone’s favourite character, it doesn’t work if you haven’t got the rest of the gang. This album needs more Phoebe Buffay. 

‘Wild Love’ will be released on Friday 7th August via Transgressive Records – Pre Order It Here

https://thesplice.co.uk/2026/08/12/album-review-nina-winder-lind-wild-love-transgressive-records/