Sky Is Alright

Rishi Neal Arora has spent his life drawing comfort from music that holds two things at once: the weight of loss and the stubborn persistence of hope. That language informed how he wrote, channelling those influences through his long-time project, Signal Hill, and now seamlessly into Sky Is Alright, the transatlantic project he shares with his longtime collaborator and childhood friend, Chris Gregory (Belted Sweater, Gayt). And while his music always had a personal reference, it had never demanded an emotional weight like this. FINITE. – out November 4 via Shore Dive Records – is the record Arora wrote in the aftermath of his sister’s death in 2022. She was, by his own account, someone who shaped his musical identity in no small way. The result is Sky Is Alright’s most fully realised work to date: an album about mortality, memory and the persistence of love in the face of loss, spanning from the disorientation of receiving the phone call ("Angeli"), to the devastating intimacy of the record’s quietly shattering finale ("Rendered Obsolete") that imagines her final moments on Earth. For Arora and Gregory, who have long been fluent in the emotional potential and harmonic weight of distorted guitars and layered sound, FINITE. is the moment that understanding becomes something more than aesthetic. 25 years of friendship and a lifetime of music that taught them how to feel things in public converge on the hardest subject they’ve ever had to say out loud. –Mac Nguyen