About two and a half minutes into the title track of Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing, a towering drum and bass break suddenly tears through the haze. For anyone who came to Nayar through her debut album, Our Hands Against The Dusk, the moment lands like a shock to the system. That earlier release had no percussion whatsoever, and much of Heaven Come Crashing also moves without traditional drums. “Tetramorph,” the second track, flickers with tight, mechanical hi-hats, while the latter stretch of “Gayatri,” track six, seems to hide something like a snare far beneath the surface. But the real rhythmic detonation does not arrive until track seven, where Nayar briefly lets the beat erupt before slipping, just one song later, back into the calming shimmer of “Sleepless.”
Nayar’s sound—a guitar-driven, ambient-adjacent blend of texture, melody, and emotional force—can feel like M83 beamed in from another timeline. In that imagined version, Anthony Gonzalez never chased ’80s pop grandeur, but instead wrung every ounce of feeling from his sweeping instrumental passages. Heaven Come Crashing carries the weight its title suggests, yet it reaches that intensity with very little language. The album’s only vocal presence comes from Maria BC, whose voice drifts through the title track and returns for the breathtaking closer “Our Wretched Fate,” where her wordless cries feel less like lyrics than pure grief suspended in air.
The title track does contain words, though they are nearly swallowed by surging guitar lines and luminous drones, with Maria BC delivering them in a hushed, submerged whisper:
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.
