Disiniblud's Magical Album for Who You Used to Be

Listening to Disiniblud, the beautiful new project by close friends and composers Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith, kinda always has me fucked up in the game. Full of twinkling melodies made with processed guitar, piano, and other electronically tweaked instruments, it has a staggering, generous beauty to it that makes me a little beside myself. I almost have to be emotionally prepared for it when I listen—it’s music meant to capture the wide emotional latitude of childhood that, for me, serves as a kind of portal to moments when I felt my freest: at 10, making up dances in my mother’s living room to Whitney Houston songs; at any age, in the embrace of my tía Josie, now gone, as she repeated our catchphrase: “I love you so fucking much I could just shit.”

I suppose you could call it ambient music, but the kind that’s loud and washes over you like the ocean; there’s so much feeling in, say, the warmth of Nayar’s guitar solo gliding over watery squelches at the end of “It’s Change,” before Keith’s piano swoops in to grab its hand. Or the whorl of distortion at the end of “Whole30 Fight Club” which reminds us that to be gentle is also to wield power. I’ve been listening to this album since April, when I first spoke with Nayar at an early listening session about Disiniblud’s hope to tap into the wonder of youth, and about imagining childhood without the gender constructs forced upon us all; specifically those rigid demands invented to subsume every kid, no matter how they identify, into the masculinist patriarchy. We were seated in leather chairs at an audiophile tea shop in lower Manhattan when she told me that “through my connection with my inner-child self… I've been able to heal a lot of these things that we all experience.”

Disiniblud (pronounced Diz-knee-blood), their self-titled debut, dropped officially last week, and I Zoomed with the duo for further insight on an album that, for me, demands rapt emotional investment. They’ve been making the album for four years, a work borne of their deep friendship. And since this shit feels like a big hug to me, I wondered how love and respect factored into making the album. “It's one thing to just sit in a room together and play around on our instruments and hit the record button,” said Keith, “but then to devote ourselves to these songs and to have a mutual understanding of what it could turn into… The only way we can really get there is with an enormous amount of trust in each other to put it in each other's hands to actually finish a song, and to keep growing together through that process. That love for each other and each other’s musicality is so crucial.”

Perhaps that’s part of the feeling of listening to Disiniblud—a way to peer into Keith and Nayar’s friendship, and how working together makes their conception of beauty and vulnerability fuller, in a way. “Whenever I’m writing on my own, music always comes from a place of self-love in some way for me,” said Nayar, “and then to open up the part of me that's the most vulnerable or fragile with another person to make music that's actually true—you have to really go into that very delicate inner place. I think it takes a lot of love in a space to go there together.”

I know I’m pretty gloopy about this album and how emo it makes me, but I would be remiss to mention that there’s humor in it, too, from unexpected little trills to song titles like “whole30 Fight Club” and “[As is Most (Bimbo it Out)].” Keith told me she wanted to name one song “Drafted into Chili’s,” but laughed that it was “maybe too far gone. What humor we do let fully get emitted is such a small piece of how brain-rotted we are.”

“‘Drafted into Chili's’ will be on the next album,” Nayar retorts. “Yeah, I feel like my own music has a certain sobriety to it, or a darkness, and I feel like making music with Nina is a place for these other parts of my whole humanity to come out… to step into my whole artistic self. I get to live in my fullness with Nina through this project, and I feel like our, like, brain-rotted, bimbo wisdom together is a big part of that.”

We laughed for a bit, and then I may have glooped some of my gloop upon them, and then I asked how they now perceive this album, after making it for so long. “To me, it feels like I'm starting a sentence without knowing where I'm about to end it, and…” Keith said, trailing off. She paused for a moment and then continued, “My brain was genuinely trying to find the poetic way of putting it, but all I could think of is, like the Kool-Aid man. It feels emotionally like a Kool-Aid man is busting in, but he's like, crying.”