Today, april27 — an artist whose captivating music serves as the means for building the world fo an ongoing “surrealist horror love story”— shares the haunting video for “prayer1,” a track that serves as the entry point into an immersive, nightmarish world.

Watch the “prayer1” video, co-created by april27 and Kyber0114, here, and learn more about april27 in a new feature over at NYLON.

Sonically, april27’s “prayer1” is a compelling work: dark but propulsive house production that falls somewhere between House Of Balloons-era The Weekend and Fred again.., but with a haunting drop inspired by traditional and sacred Indian music. april27 says he sampled his grandmother praying to make the song. It’s short but addictive — there are enough juxtaposing elements to keep listeners returning to that yearning melody.

The track is not just a genuine smash (over 16 million streams on Spotify alone, with over 1 million likes on TikTok and over 125k organic creates) but just the tip of the iceberg. Through his videos and social media posts, april27 is building a world beyond the music.

Inspired by the strategies employed in video game open-world level design, he’s constructed a narrative that’s part spooky copypasta, part sleep paralysis hallucination. He says the music is all composed in a tunnel between a temple and a nightclub — a statement on liminality or purgatory, it’s not quite clear.

The aesthetic, all rendered and authored by april27, smashes the sparse smoothness of modernity against the unknowable contours of Eastern spirituality. It suggests a soul in crisis, or a society in decline, or perhaps something yet to be discovered.