Brooklyn, NY based artist Rachika Nayar today announced that her second full-length album, Heaven Come Crashing, will be released on August 26th, 2022 via NNA Tapes.
Heaven Come Crashing finds the protean guitarist and electronic producer expanding on the ghostly netherworlds of her acclaimed debut, Our Hands Against The Dusk, and the intimate guitar miniatures of companion EP, fragments, with vivid, fluorescent, cinematic maximalism.
Alongside the announcement, Nayar shared a Will Hart-directed music video for the album’s meteoric lead single, “Heaven Come Crashing.” The title track offers a glimpse of Nayar’s sharp left-turn on the album towards explosive electronic, as she melds her signature granular guitar contortions with haunting vocals from ambient pop artist maria bc and a sampled synth from Rafael Anton Irissari — the result is an atmospheric fantasia evoking reverence-filled arenas, a slow build to kinetic breakbeats that crescendo with wild abandon.
WATCH: “Heaven Come Crashing” (feat. maria bc)
On Our Hands Against the Dusk, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing. Soon after, the album’s companion EP, fragments, demonstrated the types of raw guitar-playing that would be transfigured into those grander compositions—miniature genre sketches that touched upon everything from post-rock to Midwestern emo. With these two 2021 releases, Rachika resculpted the limits of both guitar and electronic music, placing her at the forefront of various contemporary music scenes in her current home of New York City and more broadly amongst the likes of Fennesz, Julianna Barwick, and Tim Hecker.
Heaven Come Crashing retains Nayar’s mangled guitar stylings but expands the color palette by looking not so much to the fretboard, as to the dance floor and the silver screen. Influences enter into the frame ranging from ’90s trance, to early M83, to Yoko Kanno anime soundtracks. With its M1 piano stabs, supersaws, and glimpses of Amen breaks, the album charts a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and the urban freeways of its cover image—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon.
On the topic, Nayar says: “I both love and feel so wary of melodrama, because its entire premise is to be uncritical. Taking your most massive emotions at face-value feels so fraught when they partly originate with structures you can’t control, with structures you maybe even feel at war with.”
Within this conflicted relationship to its own theatrics, the album wages a battle between surrendering to desire and incinerating it. Heaven Come Crashing invites the listener to revel within fantasy, before helping light the match to burn it down—one final embrace in the dream world before it shatters to pieces.
Heaven Come Crashing is out August 26, 2022 via NNA Tapes and is available to preorder here.
Tracklist
1. “Our Wretched Fantasy”
2. “Tetramorph”
3. “Death & Limerence”
4. “Nausea”
5. “Promises”
6. “Gayatri”
7. “Heaven Come Crashing” (ft. maria bc)
8. “Sleepless”
9. “The Price of Serenity”
10. “Our Wretched Fate” (feat. maria bc)
Shows
July 8: Viseu, Portugal @ Jardin Efemeros Festival
July 10: Prague, Czech Republic @ Creepy Teepee Festival
July 16: Urjala, Finland @ Mitäs Mitäs Mitäs Festival
July 29: Seattle, Washington @ Fremont Abbey
July 31: Victoria, Canada @ Wonderment Festival
Sept 12: London, England @ Cafe Oto
Sept 13: Glasgow, Scotland @ Glad Cafe
Oct 1: Brooklyn, New York @ Public Records
Oct 6: Chicago, Illinois @ Sleeping Village
Oct 8: Los Angeles, California @ 2220
Links
rachika.net
rachika.bandcamp.com
instagram.com/rachikanayar
facebook.com/urgirlrachika
nnatapes.com