Artists You Should Know: Revel In The Aural Magic Of Monad's New Single "Light in an Empty Room"

Refulgent dream-pop specialist Monad has just shared a new single in the form of the sonically crystalline “Light in an Empty Room.” If this is your first time listening to the project of Tel-Aviv-based artist and producer Eshchar Nachmany, it doesn’t take long to find yourself blissfully enveloped by his psychedelic shoegaze creations. Their last two releases alone — which included the riveting “Intuition (At Whitewood)” and a phenomenal cover of “Heaven or Las Vegas” by Cocteau Twins — are reason enough to take a dive into the sublime music they create.

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With “Light in an Empty Room,” Monad continues to expand the interstellar dreaminess that coats his inspired music. Much of that is owed to the artist’s own luminous imagination, which was spurred to create the song after a viewing of the Edward Hopper painting “Sun In An Empty Room.” Everything from the single’s melodic opulence to its gauzy atmosphere was inspired by the artwork. But it also reveals their ambitious layering of an infinity of lush tones and textures within their cavernous soundscapes.

“‘Light in an Empty Room’ was born out of a writing exercise I was trying at the time,” Monad explained. “Writing a song inspired by a visual piece — I stumbled upon Hopper’s ‘Sun in an Empty Room’ and something in it immediately deeply resonated with me, there’s an introspective quality to it; that painting is a direct influence for this song, which like the painting deals with feelings of otherness and isolation (on the inside and on the outside) in its own way.”

Like Monad’s previous single “Intuition (At Whitewood),” the new single is tangibly incandescent. It warms you with every buoyant crash of percussion and even with all of its lugubrious vocal transmissions, like an interdimensional broadcast bursting through the black cosmic ether. Or perhaps, more accurately, as a single column of light piercing the solitary ambiance of an empty room. That is what Monad offers up: an aural metaphor to resound within you.

Monad has unveiled two EPs since they started releasing music back in 2017. The second and most recent arrived in 2020 as Dissolution and it immediately set them apart with its resounding sonics and ethereally earnest kineticism. Those who pine for the sluggishly radiant Tame Impala found within Innerspeaker and Lonerism — this is right up your psychedelic-riff-wailing alley. Highlights include the warped-out and euphorically beaming “September,” as well as the lagging crescendos of abrasively gleaming guitars that shriek on the ecstatic “Dawn Chorus.”