Last May, Alethea Leventhal released her third full-length album as Ships in the Night , Protection Spells, with two Black Lodge Balls in Virginia. The David Lynch-themed events were planned before the director’s death and were a “labor of love” for the singer and her team. “Emphasis on labor,” says Leventhal on a recent phone call. There were costumes and cover songs. Leventhal herself performed “I’m Deranged,” the David Bowie song that appeared in Lost Highway. The show’s lighting designer projected a Black Lodge floor. “I wish I could have seen the show,” she says on a recent phone call. “I was on stage so I couldn’t see it in quite the same way.”
In case it weren’t already clear, Leventhal is a David Lynch fan. In particular, the soundtracks from his work has been an inspiration for Ships in the Night. So has David Bowie, Kate Bush, Motown and Depeche Mode, whose 1990 hit, “Enjoy the Silence” she covers on Protection Spells. Leventhal recalls hearing the song for the first time, via a mix CD, when she was 13. “I heard that song and remember thinking what is this? How do they do that? What are those sounds?” she recalls.
Over the years, “Enjoy the Silence” stuck with Leventhal. When she heard Depeche Mode play it live just a couple years ago, she says, she wept. While Leventhal has long wanted to cover the song, she had reservations because, “this song is so perfect.” For Protection Spells, though, she decided to just go for it. “That felt really empowering, to be like, I just want to have it on this album,” she says. “It’s just a tribute to a band that’s inspired me so much.”
Leventhal has been making music under the name Ships in the Night since 2015 and, on her latest album, she cultivates a dreamy, yet danceable, contemporary synthpop sound. “It’s changed a lot,” says Leventhal of the Ships in the Night sound. Early on, she says, she had a lot of ideas and a lot to say, which, she acknowledges, translated into long songs with lots of layers. “I even had a song where I remember looking at the track and I put 26 layers of pad sounds on top of one another, which is really excessive,” she recalls. “I would never do that now but at the time I was like, this one sounds cool, this sounds neat, let’s add this.”
After years of writing and learning more about production, Leventhal opts for a simpler and more intentional approach to making music. Now, she says, she’s more conscious of how the song will hit the listener. “I think that’s made me feel really good, a sense of being able to release something and know that it’s exactly how I was hearing it in my head,” she says.
For Leventhal, who is currently based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has also lived in New York, influences can vary depending on where she is. “I know that when I’m in New York, it feels like I take a lot of my music inspiration from just walking around and hearing the world outside of me,” she says. “In the city, it’s things like the sounds or the hum of the train versus in Virginia and more rural places, a bird call or something like that. I’m really inspired by things like that and that’s so different from place to place.”
While some songs on Protection Spells trace their roots back nearly a decade, the album itself didn’t start to come together until fall of 2024. With the election happening around the time that Leventhal was working on the album, Protection Spells became an apt title. “I actually was casting protection spells with my friends,” she says. “It was fall. It was around the time of year when the veil feels the thinnest. There would be a full moon and we would cast a spell. There was one time that we did cast a protection spell and it just suddenly fit and that’s the name of the album.”
She adds, “It feels like it’s been a while now where the world has felt really, really wild and I think we all need to protect each other as much as we can. I think that, in a small way, this is my gesture, trying to do that with however music can help people through hard times.”
The theme carries through on songs like “Blood Harmony,” which opens Protection Spells. “It’s really referring to the contrast of good and evil, if that exists and power and taking power back,” she says of the song, which was released as a single in April. “That is definitely in reference to magic, but also something very tangible.”
“Inside,” where Leventhal juxtaposes her gentle vocals with an electronic slap of a beat, is another song related to Protection Spells. It is, she says, “in a different way about safety and protection and people keeping each other safe.” But, overall, she says, the album’s title is also a thread that runs throughout the full-length. “I think that almost every song can be linked back to it in a way,” she says.
Recently, Ships in the Night performed at Wave-Gotik-Treffen, the annual festival in Leipzig, Germany dedicated to dark music genres. “Most of all, I had a really meaningful time at the merch table afterwards,” Leventhal says. There, she was able to connect with listeners from across the globe, from DJs who play her music to a coup in their 60s who listened to one of her albums on their first date. “It was really special because of the people and getting to see how the music has spread and been shared through this scene,” she says. “That was really special and cool and those little stories are the thing that really makes music the most meaningful for me, above anything else.”
Get Protection Spells by Ships in the Night, out now on Metropolis Records. Follow Ships in the Night on Instagram or Facebook for updates, including fall tour dates.
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Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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