Nara’s Room are Learning to Let Go While Building a Sound That Lasts
Nara’s Room. Photo credit: Felix Walworth.
In a scene that often rewards velocity over intention, Nara’s Room move with deliberate care. The Brooklyn-based project—led by songwriter/guitarist Nara Avakian with Ethan Nash on bass and Brendan Jones on drums, are the kind of band that would rather build their trajectory than a moment. Signed to Mtn Laurel Recording Co., they have become a compelling live shoegaze act, crafting songs that feel both fragile yet mature, while surrounding those songs with a community that grows by genuine connection.
That ethos clicked into view after a shared bill with on the rise Canadian group Ribbon Skirt, a band Avakian talks about with affection and respect. “They are incredible, such sweetie pies,” Avakian laughs. The friendship traces back to SXSW, where mutual friends overlapped and stayed in touch. “Meeting them, it was like we were already friends and I love that,” Avakian says, pointing to the way festivals compress years of touring into a few days of meaningful collisions, especially at SXSW where bands are playing upwards of five shows throughout the week.
That lens frames how Nara’s Room think about everything from shows to spending. “I try to be intentional with everything we do in the band, whether it’s dropping money on a photo shoot or playing a certain show,” Avakian says. “We want to be able to sustain ourselves creatively and monetarily.” The honesty lands with force because it’s rooted in lived reality, not cynicism. Avakian cites Linda Ronstadt’s memoir as a North Star for perspective: even in the ’60s/’70s, after Ronstadt signed to Capitol, “it took her eight years to actually start seeing the money…she was hoping to buy a washing machine with the tour money. Then she got sick the last two dates and couldn’t buy that washing machine.” The point is not despair; it’s clarity. “Being a band is expensive and tough…you’re lucky to even make enough from merch to split it and cover laundry.”
Photo credit: Felix Walworth.
Despite the challenges, Avakian continually pushes through the obstacles that come with creating art through collaboration and perspective, which also shapes the band’s lineup story. Avakian didn’t start singing until 19 or 20, “I always played guitar, since I was 10”—and initially imagined an instrumental folk path. A friend teased them out of the perfectionist cave (“Alex G can’t necessarily sing,” someone joked, and it flipped a switch for her). After some early show experiments and a Craigslist callout (“I was looking for a queer, non-white, non-male bassist and drummer,” Avakian explained), the universe sent the opposite: “Two straight white dudes responded.” Despite that, they became family. “There’s no one else who would be so perfect. Ethan has this way of underscoring the emotion that lies in my guitar. My guitar represents this surface-level emotion, and Ethan really goes deep. Brendan will just thrash and is always finding new ways to play. We have this incredible dynamic.”
Live, that chemistry translates into a textured volatility, why Glassy Star, the band’s debut LP, resonated so strongly when it landed. The title is more than a wink; it’s a playful echo and a personal motif. “It’s a play on Mazzy Star,” Avakian admits, one of those formative bands you ‘discover’ at just the right time. But the glassy part had taken on a life of its own across multiple songs and images. “I was obsessed with the imagery of glass. You can either break through or treat it very delicately.” The record captured a band whose onstage dynamic was finally finding a studio shape. “People said it really captures our live energy,” Avakian says, proud but restless. “Our approach with the next album is: step into the production of it all. We have live down; now I want to really focus on production.”
Part of that evolution comes from widening the creative circle. Nara’s Room added a fourth live presence in Will Fisher, a collaborator whose “ambient duty” role—keys, guitar, textures—opened new space. “He creates sounds that aren’t necessarily an extra guitar part or a keyboard part, but literal ambiance,” Avakian explains. “Having him in the mix really elevated our sound and gave us room to experiment.”
Photo credit: Felix Walworth.
That expansion also deepened what Avakian calls their aim to make shoegaze feel accessible. “I love rock music and noise, but I don’t want people to feel shut out by it,” they say. “I want the emotion to still be clear through the distortion. The shimmer and the haze should pull you in, not push you away.”
The seed of openness sprouted during the Glassy Star cycle, specifically, after the album’s initial rush receded and the second album fog crept in. “I felt like Glassy Star at the time was our magnum opus,” Avakian admits. “Then working on the second album I was like, what was I thinking? Calling something your magnum opus can limit you. I was in a rut… I had to let go.” A crucial nudge came from the band’s manager, Chella—“She really sent it to me straight: you’ve got to let go of Glassy Star.”
Which brings us to the one-year celebration: a remix release reframing the LP’s core songs and, more importantly, Avakian’s relationship to them. “By quite literally relinquishing control—sending stems to really talented people whose music I admire and then hearing it, the remix EP affirmed me as a songwriter,” Avakian says. “I felt like an old-school songwriter: present a demo or lyrics and let other people interpret.” The results aren’t polite touch-ups; they’re reinventions. “The remix of ‘Teeth’ was done by my best friend Trevor [Hausholding],” Avakian says. “He took it and totally flipped it on its head, basically created a whole new song with it.” Elsewhere, friends like Sister. contribute interpretations that loop back to the label itself; those personal connections eventually led Avakian to Mtn Laurel—proof that community is a career strategy, not a slogan.
That emphasis on human-first growth shades Avakian’s advice to new bands. Don’t start by shopping for a team; start by showing up. “When you’re on the ground, you actually meet people who love your music and you make friends and create an actual community,” Avakian shares. That’s how Chella entered the picture (“She saw us live and said, ‘I want to manage you’”), and how Mtn Laurel did, too. “It’s about the friends you make along the way. The people who will support you for you and then look out for you.”
Visuals extend that principle of honest presence. Avakian is “deeply attached to ’90s/2000s TV,” hence the charming Nara’s TV stingers stylized like MTV and analog textures weaved throughout their visuals—and treats video not as garnish but as storytelling. “I like for a piece of myself to be in everything,” they say. Working in filmic references might read nostalgic, but they flip the frame. “How can it be nostalgic if I’m making it now? Using those aesthetics as a way to depict the present deepens them. It’s my way of making my own present.”
As they record their next LP, Nara’s Room are channeling that idea into process: broaden the circle, trust your people, and reserve vetoes for the moments that matter. “With Glassy Star, it was a tight team and that served what it needed to at the time,” Avakian says. “With LP2, I’m relinquishing control and letting everyone go off. I still have veto power as Nara of Nara’s Room… but I haven’t whipped one out yet,” they add, smiling.
In the meantime, the one-year Glassy Star remix EP functions like a mirror held at a new angle: the same object refracts differently, revealing facets you couldn’t see when you were holding it too close. “When you cling tightly, glass breaks and the shards cut you,” Avakian says, extending the album’s central image. “I treated Glassy Star like that—clung too tightly—when I should have just put it on my shelf and looked at it. The remixes helped me do that. They let me release the record so I could keep writing.”
That release isn’t an ending; it’s permission. It’s also a celebration of the friendships that got Nara’s Room here and the ones that will carry them forward to more festival nights that feel like summer camp, to a first Canadian run with friends like Ribbon Skirt, to bigger, bolder videos, and to a second LP that will continue their momentum. “We just want to take everything we learned from the process of Glassy Star and pour it into this one,” Avakian says.
If Glassy Star asked us to hold something delicate up to the sky, the remix collection invites us to set it down, step back, and notice how it gleams from different sides. One year on, Nara’s Room are cultivating a brighter constellation built on intention, mutual care, and the kind of art that keeps unfolding the more friends you let touch it.
