It’s All Coming Back Around for Chandra on ‘As The Dust Settles’
Chandra never intended to share these songs with the world. The seeds of her debut EP, As the Dust Settles, were laid during her sophomore year at Columbia. Writing in her bedroom became Chandra’s way of figuring herself out and working through difficult emotions. From the start, she was unafraid of complete vulnerability—these songs were just for her. As Chandra’s college career unfolded, she began performing live (including opening Bacchanal 2024), breathing new life into her songs. For the first time, she began to see how these emotional spells of music fit together in a way that could be shared with the world.
During her time at Columbia, Chandra struggled with her dueling identities: the math major and the musician. She had been trained in the south Indian classical dance style Kuchipudi and classical singing since a young age, and tried hard to continue these pursuits in college. After graduating from SEAS last May, Chandra has found herself accepting “the identity of being an artist” with open arms: “I don’t have to suppress any sort of creativity in pursuit of something else that I have to do; I can choose my identity so much more calmly,” Chandra admits. She is, however, exceedingly grateful to have endured such a conflict; she cites her time at Columbia as invaluable for making connections, building her artistry, and preparing her for life ahead.
As The Dust Settles explores themes that are always on Chandra’s mind: spiritual alignment, karmic cycles, being at peace, living in the moment. The collection opens with “Intro,” a meditative invitation into the world of the project with delicate instrumentals and velvety soft vocals. Recorded live, the song narrates a scene of Chandra grounding herself by digging her hands into the soil, asking the Earth for answers; she invokes the muse of nature and the universe to guide her through the EP. The next track, introspective and reclamatory, “The Sun” was the first single of the project. She explains how cycles “propel the project forward,” as “No Record,” the second-to-last track on the EP, depicts a parallel scene, but this time happening at night. The goal was to move from day to night across the record.
One of Chandra’s personal favorites is “Dull Pink,” on which she ponders karmic cycles and what it means to “sit with your melancholy and kind of enjoy it in a weird way.” She describes karmic cycles as deserving the things that are coming to you: in her case, justifying being in harmful relationships as retribution for past actions, and the guilt that accompanies that.
She discovers, though, that karmic cycles can also work in the opposite direction: you can also deserve all of the good that comes to you. On “Second Time Around,” she trusts the return of someone coming back into her life as a positive event. Her performance is fluid and relaxed—imbued with the confidence of “what it feels like to be in alignment with everything in your life.” Across the EP, Chandra takes the listener on a journey of “grappling with trusting time and place and the people that are in your life,” ultimately finding inner peace and freedom. The project concludes with this tranquility, as she sings: “Don’t rush, let the waves sting/ Our cuts are already healing/ You believe in free will/ I’m freed by my faith in time/… I’m freed by my faith in you.”
Chandra wants people to connect with her on an emotional level, to understand this EP as an extension of herself: “this project feels very authentic to who I am.” Music, for the Brooklyn-based musician, is meditation. She cites her classical training as the reason: “The way you practice that is you show up for yourself every day… and sit with yourself; it’s a very meditative, deep thing for me. I hope that seriousness and that soulfulness is translated in the music.” Live performance is crucial for Chandra; she feels her responsibility as an artist is to craft beautiful energies, to “breathe emotion into the physical space.” She followed up the release of the EP with a show at Berlin. Now based in Brooklyn, she is excited about future plans to share new music in more live spaces.
As The Dust Settles leaves the listener enlightened—entranced by Chandra’s ethereal vocals and lyrical spirituality. During the cover shoot at Brighton Beach, she and her photographer had to take cover from pouring rain that left the sky dark, but embellished with a double rainbow. If that isn’t a sign of the universal alignment Chandra achieves on the record, I don’t know what is.