Two minutes and thirty seconds into the title track of Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing, an absolutely massive drum and bass beat drops. As a fan of Nayar’s debut record Our Hands Against The Dusk, it caught me off guard. That album has no percussion on it at all. Heaven Comes Crashing is almost entirely drum-free, too. There are some rapid-fire mechanical hi-hats on the second track, “Tetramorph,” and the back half of track six, “Gayatri,” has what sounds like a snare buried deep in the mix. But it isn’t until track seven that Nayar delivers an unexpected drum explosion, before immediately retreating to the soothing wash of “Sleepless,” just one song later.
Nayar’s unique brand of guitar-heavy ambient-adjacent music plays almost like a version of M83 from an alternate universe. One where instead of turning to ‘80s pop music for inspiration, Anthony Gonzalez mined his instrumental epics for every last drop of emotion. Heaven Comes Crashing is as emotionally heavy as the title would imply but uses surprisingly few words to get there. The only vocals come courtesy of Maria BC, who floats over the title track and the stunning album closer “Our Wretched Fate,” where she worldlessly belts out her laments.
There are lyrics on “Heaven Comes Crashing,” but they’re almost indecipherable as Maria BC whispers beneath an ocean of flailing guitar lines and sparkling drones:
Is it morning?
I don’t remember going to sleep
How can we face the day
Like this?
You throw down your arms and count to see
How deep it is
Instead of words, Nayar turns to heavily processed guitar, lonesome textures, and the occasional burst of trance chords to capture the desperate longing at the album’s core. But the album is also an indictment of the sort of abandon that often accompanies unbridled passion. It’s bookended by “Our Wretched Fantasy” and “Our Wretched Fate,” betraying a certain disgust for its own emotional recklessness. Track three isn’t “Death and Love”; it’s “Death and Limerence” — opting to spotlight unhealthy romantic obsession rather than fulfilling emotional partnership, through U2-esque guitar lines that eventually drown beneath heavily reverbed and out-of-tune tremolo-picked notes.
That’s followed by the unease of “Nausea,” which builds from an unsteady drone to maximalist panic of ‘90s synths and one of the simplest and prettiest guitar melodies on the record. The ambient emo of “Promises” follows, leading into “Gayatri,” which ratchets up the energy and serves as a bridge to the explosive title track.