Rachel Angel - Midnite Heart Attack (2022)

The singer-songwriter has a love/hate relationship with her hometown. Debut Album, Midnite Heart Attack. Rachel Angel's croon on the title track of her debut album Midnite Heart Attack has a distinctly country music twang. But before the song's end, there's the shred of an electric guitar played in reverse, giving it a less earthy, more surreal effect fitting from where the album found its inspiration.

"A lot of the songs come from dreams or a dream-like state," Angel tells New Times. The album's title, Midnite Heart Attack, points to the themes of anxiety and emotional hardships. Angel says much of the album reflects on challenging times and how she found the impetus to dive inward. Her songwriting process involves cranking out the melody first, and then the lyrics come out of a stream of consciousness. Though she cautions, "I don't sit down and say I'm going to write about a specific thing. It's more vibrational."

In a preview of single ‘Closer to Myself‘, we described how Rachel Angel‘s latest release Midnite Heart Attack is a record born of suffering away from home. Out via Ruzafa Records, the album was written upon Angel’s return to Florida after what she describes as a “trying bout of physical, emotional, and spiritual hardships abroad.” An attempt to re-center oneself after being uprooted for an extended period, triggered by the titular experience—”a defining moment of reckoning, upon which one is confronted with the decision to change or die”—in order to find peace and contentment once again.

The experience is set out with the opening title track, where illusions of youthful invulnerability are dispelled by the sudden onset of pain. “Was up midnight all around / I was twenty-two / Drinking till sundown / Like I was bulletproof,” Angel sings, driven onwards by the upbeat country rock tempo. “And now I’m grown / I think I can pull it / Ain’t got no home / Where I belong.” The self-deprecation is apparent but so to the spark of change. A genuine epiphany played back to us in real time. The moment when Rachel Angel decided to change and live.