ARIMA EDERRA:

Poetry came first for Arima Ederra, the Los Angeles based singer who’d spent her formative years in Las Vegas. It was there that she first flirted with singing by way of open mics at poetry nights that soon invited her to cover songs from her favorite artists including Bob Marley, Lauryn Hill and Little Dragon. By 2016, she’d moved to Los Angeles and put out Temporary Fixes, an EP of original songs experimenting with her R&B influences on unconventionally structured and textured songs about time and mortality. Her debut LP An Orange Colored Day followed in 2022, a tenderizing meditation on loss and the life that follows heartbreak. Ederra’s honeyed voice singing with childlike curiosity and earnestness gained her fans. The album, largely produced by Ederra and Teo Halm (Rosalía’s “Con Altura”, SZA’s “Open Arms”, Omar Apollo’s “Everygreen”) wove through stories of loss and heartbreak and by the end, she arrives at faith.

In February 2026, the singer-songwriter is set to release her second LP titled A Rush To Nowhere, an invitation over the course of fourteen songs to slow down and experience time without fearing its passing. Ederra wrote ARTN’s songs over the course of two years including on trips away from her LA base recording the album’s songs after she’d returned back home. She reunites with Halm who co-produced much of the album’s fourteen tracks along with Rahm Silverglade. In the project’s first single, “Heard What You Said,” the two create a moody offering moored by a slick synth and a plucky electric guitar. The electric rock architecture suits Ederra’s birdsong vocals just right. Her sound thus far has been less driven by genre as she comfortably travels around soul, R&B, and pop sonic qualities belonging to the Black music tradition to which she belongs and reflective of the singers she admires most including Amel Larrieux and Stevie Wonder. Her musical signature is really an earnestness — her songs stand like one curious question piling on top of the other held by delicious melodies to make songs that swell from reflections to prayers, from diary entries to wide-eyed declarations.

For three months during the writing process, Ederra exclusively listened to Joni Mitchell, Minnie Ripperton, Stevie Wonder and Prince demos. She came out especially inspired by Ripperton’s collaboration with the prolific producer Charles Stepney. The duo encouraged Ederra and Halm, who executive produced the project, to tinker and experiment on ARTN moving from blooming harps on one song to tender piano keys backing a haunting collage of the singer’s voice. Just as captivating is a moment where her whisper grows into a bright belt over a composition of her own soft, humming refrain. Naturally, as Ederra’s songs grow in numbers, they’re also expanding in shape — their depth and structure taking more elaborate forms in service to the feelings she so faithfully metabolizes through her music.

The inquiry grounding Ederra’s new album is the perennial question of time, how it unfurls to spell out our lives, our relationships and their patterns that shape them. “Time was always good to me, don’t know why I was running,” she sings on “In This Life”, A Rush to Nowhere’s second track. Time and memory swirl around the project’s lyrics building a logic Ederra was drawn to about the question time — time as a spiral holding both past, present and future. Temporal delineations collapsed in favor of the way time is felt and experienced. The production services this central inquiry of time. Tracks build and transform with time, at times stopping entirely to take breath before moving along again. Drums beat like a horse’s steady gallop. Vocals overlaid and repeated stretch wide the space of a song.

Visually, Ederra’s representation of her meditations on time take on the qualities of chiaroscuro tableau. In the video for “Heard What You Said,” a long and colorful hallway of memories leads to black and white scenes of abstract allegories. A hand turns a vase holding a lonely flower stem. The singer walks away from a hanging corded telephone. She returns to sing into it: “Did I ever know you? I can’t be sure. I saw a different side, what a difference time shows.”

The rest of ARTN’s visuals follow this tenebristic quality — the colors are moody, almost blue if not black, and the lighting subdued. Clocks appear but they tick and measure time at an anomalous pace. Street scenes speed up and slow down again. Shots are overlapped suggesting some time and space displacement, some experience of a memory superimposed in the present moment. What Ederra accomplishes on A Rush To Nowhere is asking and answering the enduring question of time as the language of our lives and what sweet possibilities appear should we learn to trust time long enough to settle into its vast unknown.