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Arima Ederra made melancholy feel sunny on her debut, An Orange Colored Day. As wildfires blazed in the distance, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter saw beauty in the inflamed skies. When her dad came home exhausted from late-night shifts as a cab driver, she spied the love in his “hawk red eyes”—one of the album’s many pairings of nature, color, and memory. Under Ederra’s hopeful gaze, even unrequited love felt wondrous: “But you’ve got two holes/Sitting on your face/They look like portals/Sinking through a maze,” she sang on “Portals,” yearning for a friendship to lead to something more.
Her enchanted world feels hotter and darker on A Rush to Nowhere. Working with a tight crew of session musicians, and sporting an expanded vocal repertoire, Ederra offers a bolder, sleeker take on the golden-hued folk and R&B of her debut. Where An Orange Colored Day was gestural and allusive, A Rush to Nowhere is direct. There’s more passion in her delivery, more shadows in the lambent reveries she often slips into—shifts that up the urgency of her introspective music.
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If Ederra was previously a journaler processing experiences within the bound margins of the page, here we’re privy to the thoughts as they pop into her head. “I’m in the business of feeling,” she declares early on, establishing the limbic mood. Ederra’s not as frenzied a writer as KeiyaA, who likes to structure verses like spiraling thoughts, but the shift in approach makes her more fluid. There’s less remove in her writing here, freeing her to harness the newly expressive qualities of her voice. The record is dressed to the nines with warbles, trills, and harmonies that she didn’t seem capable of on Orange.
That capacity makes Ederra’s singing more dynamic and engaging. Her leap from giddy whispers to a piercing croon on “Second Time” shakes the song awake. You can tell she’s serious when she demands her sweetheart say “I love you” twice so she knows it’s sincere. On the smoldering “First Time,” she sings almost entirely in a breathy coo, holding steady until the end, when she revisits an intimate first encounter: “It was a cold night/And the fires were lit/We were by the ocean/First time we met,” she swoons, the intensity of the memory lifting her voice. Even when she slips back to the past, immediacy guides her singing.
Ederra has said the album is loosely about her relationship with time, which often shapes her emotions. Stealing a moment on “Took the Long Way Home,” catching a breather over jangly percussion and funk guitar, she sounds playful and relieved. When an off-color comment from someone she knows makes its way to her on the synth-pop cut “Heard What You Said,” she finds herself anxiously autopsying the relationship: “Did I ever know you?” Time stops on the belted hook of reverb-heavy standout “You’re My,” where she throws a sizable pause into the deceptively simple couplet “You’re my/My baby.” There’s no dramatic inhale or fill to signal the delay, nor does the dusty beat pan out. The doting sentiment simply demands a pause, so she takes it.
The arrangements follow the same intuitive logic. Largely helmed by Teo Halm (SZA, Rosalía, Baby Keem), RAHM (Vince Staples), Solomonophonic (Ravyn Lenae, Carly Rae Jepsen), and Ederra, the production recedes and surges in lockstep with the singing. Backbeats tend to be strong or not there at all. Instruments drift in and out, sometimes accreting into subtle polyrhythms or harmonies, and other times lightly undergirding Ederra’s gorgeous runs. In its warping of folk and R&B rhythms and vocals, the record is kin to Mereba’s The Breeze Grew a Fire and Cleo Reed’s Cuntry. But Ederra and crew push their whims further.
Anything that works is fair game. A subtle salsa rhythm sashays through “In This Life.” The drumless “Head or Tails” dims the lights for incandescent campfire folk that recalls Bon Iver. “Gemini Eyes” opens with subdued keys then slowly builds into a rousing psych-soul number that dissolves into self-affirmations. “I’m made of many,” Ederra chants, articulating the record’s quiet ethos.
It’s the only time she draws attention to the deep-seated syncretism at the heart of the songwriting. That reserve goes against the maximalist creep of the past decade or so. When artists want to signal a breadth of influences and ideas, they typically go big: recording in multiple languages, stuffing songs with beat switches and wonky time signatures, summoning armies of collaborators, declaring “eras.” The spectacle works sometimes, sure. But the quiet alchemy of performance can be just as impressive. That’s the case on “Shine,” a highlight.
It’s a plaintive song about loss, about time that can’t be recuperated. Someone Ederra knows has died, and the pain stings. Their absence has warped her own sense of time and space, she confesses over plangent guitar strums. She feels her days dwindling and losses accumulating. “I’m running out of shoulders,” she says, an image of both scarcity and severance. But for the hook, she dreams of abundance, dropping her voice to a breathy murmur and running through syllables as she imagines more time with the deceased. She wants to hug them, protect them, see them grow, shine—wishes she details in the giddy sprechgesang cadence of early Destiny’s Child. A Rush to Nowhere is full of moments like that, where songs shapeshift with little warning but still feel smooth. Time may be cruel, but Ederra bends it to her needs.
