Disinblud

This is the debut full-length from the duo of Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, who previously collaborated on a single back in 2021. Notably, I was a big fan of Nayar’s early guitar-centric releases (Our Hands Across The Dusk and Fragments), but she lost me a bit with the “maximalist synths, sub-bass, and Amen breaks” of her 2022 breakout album Heaven Come Crashing (I’m definitely in the minority on that one). This is my first encounter with Nina Keith, however, and it definitely will not be the last.

Notably, being a self-taught neoclassical composer who dropped out of high school while wrestling with Tourette’s syndrome is probably the least interesting aspect of Keith’s life, as her debut album MARANSATI 19111 explored a “a personal history marked by community tragedy and paranormal incidents.” Much of that personal history remains an enigma, but EMDR therapy and the unsolved “Boy in the Box” murder both loom quite large in it. Given all of that, I could not have begun to guess what a shared vision between two such artists might sound like, but Disinblud eliminates the need for speculation, as this album is deliriously shapeshifting and kaleidoscopic pop music fever dream.    

It is hard not to think of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow when listening to this album, as Keith herself describes the Disinblud vision as the duo’s “younger selves packing a satchel, holding hands, and daring one another to run away into a place of ‘wounds and wonder,’ only to discover an unforeseeable magic.” The similarity extends deeper than that, however, as it feels like the duo swapped out the imaginary pop culture of The Pink Opaque for the real pop culture of mainstream dance and pop hits as the gateway for a deep and dizzying plunge into poignant, haunting, and genre-obliterating mindfuckery. In keeping with that theme, Keith and Nayar enlisted a revolving cast of vocalists (Juliana Barwick, Tujiko Noriko, etc.) to help them realize their fractured pop dreams. 

To my ears, the strongest pieces on the album are “Blue Rags, Raging Wind” and “It’s Change.” In the former, a beautifully stuttering and flickering bell melody is joined by piano and snatches of wordless angelic vocals before erupting into a lovely jangling and chiming guitar motif. “It’s Change,” on the other hand, initially sounds like a backwards folk dance colliding with someone cheerily bantering with a puppy, then abruptly transforms into a sensuous groove with warbly backwards guitars and hazy soulful vocals that gorgeously expand into overlapping, intertwined layers. 

While the two pieces are quite different in obvious ways, they have a lot of deeper similarities and those similarities are the thread that runs throughout the entire album: epic-sounding trajectories, mirage-like transformations, cool backwards psych-inspired touches, big melodies, incredibly clean and vivid production, and improbably complicated arrangements. To use a wildly out-of-place sports analogy, Keith and Nayar swing for the fences with just about every single piece here, That is certainly familiar terrain for Nayar, as she has a tendency to invariably dial up the drama to the max in a lot of her recent work, but Keith helps to steer that inevitable eruption into more varied and intricate places than Nayar would on her own.

There are admittedly a handful of aspects to Disinblud that clash with my delicate sensibilities enough to make me feel like the oldest man in the world (shiny pop earnestness, perfect production, a TikTok-esque attention span), but the sheer volume of cool ideas that Keith and Nayar packed into this album was more than enough to help me push through any misgivings. In fact, damn near every single song here features at least one cool surprise that I never saw coming and there are host of passages that could probably make a seasoned prog band weep in admiration. 

While Disinblud may err on the side of everything-but-the-kitchen sink pop maximalism at times, their complex and inventive arrangements and wildly unpredictable transformations regularly make that seeming liability feel like an asset, as their shapeshifting pop delirium cumulatively has the feel of a life review in which intense impressions streak by in a dizzying swirl (or at least like a porous dimensional barrier is suddenly allowing different realities to freely bleed into one another). In short, this album is a tour de force in like five different ways and absolutely no one else could have made anything like it.

Listen here.