The House Beyond The Water

A house beyond the water. White birds returning every year. A light that once belonged to someone. A voice heard in an empty hallway. Rain that seems to speak. A garden that remembers more than we do. A name beneath the waves. A door whose destination has disappeared.

Nyla searches for someone throughout the record, but the album never tells us exactly who that person was. Perhaps a lover, perhaps family, perhaps childhood itself — perhaps someone who only exists now because she remembers them. And even those memories gradually become unreliable.

By the time the album reaches its final songs the question is no longer whether everything happened exactly as Nyla remembers it. It becomes something more human: does a memory have to be accurate to be true?

Musically it moves between luminous ethereal pop, intimate chamber music and subtle experimental production. Harp and piano provide the emotional foundation, while strings, glass percussion, analogue textures and enormous layers of Nyla’s own voice build a world that can feel impossibly wide one moment and almost claustrophobically intimate the next. There are moments of pure light. There are moments where the music almost disappears completely.

Not an attempt to reconstruct the past. An attempt to preserve its light.