Rain Temple is the third studio album by English-American electronic music duo of dreampunk musicians Hong Kong Express (also known as HKE) and Telepath (stylized as t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者), both collaborating under the alias 2814, released on July 26, 2016, by their record label Dream Catalogue. After the success of Birth of a New Day, one of the members stated that he wanted to "leave 2814 to rest", but he couldn't as he states that the project "just works so well for us both."
Background
In his review of the album, Sean O'Neal from The A.V. Club states that before Rain Temple, vaporwave felt like an "exhausting inside joke before it even started," adding that since the genre had been split into a multitude of subgenres, it was difficult to know "how seriously" they were to be taken, if they were serious at all. Outside of the general vaporwave community, the genre was mostly treated as a "dead" joke or meme, partly because of how some critics felt the genre was too "easy" to produce, but mainly for the genre's popularization after the release of Vektroid's Floral Shoppe, which besides presenting nearly all core vaporwave elements, became almost synonymous with the term "vaporwave" after the release of the Digg video titled "The Most Satisfying Video in the World", which presented the second track of the album.
2814 broke into the vaporwave scene with their second studio album Birth of a New Day in 2015. The album became the best-selling dreampunk release on Bandcamp, popularizing the dreampunk movement, the post-vaporwave movement, and vaporwave in general. HKE later expressed satisfaction with the album, stating that, although the duo did not plan on producing another album under the alias 2814 after Birth of a New Day, the album had received such a huge amount of positive reactions that HKE wanted to release more music under the alias since it was, in his own words, functioning perfectly for both producers.
Prior to the album's release, Telepath was already established in the vaporwave community as one of the most prolific and prominent figures in the scene, being considered as the best producer of the genre by HKE himself. His previous album, Everlasting love (stylized in Japanese for aesthetic purposes as 永遠の愛) was released on January 28, 2016, and had been praised by its Bandcamp buyers, who stated that "all the songs are wonderful, and flow perfectly together."
HKE, formerly known as Hong Kong Express, was also a popular figure of the genre. Although Birth of a New Day was the most successful album he had ever been involved in, the producer is also known for his Bandcamp debut album HK, which had been described by some of its Bandcamp buyers as their "gateway drug" to the dreampunk genre and related subgenres. His previous studio album, Omnia, was a culmination of the worldviews he express in a Rolling Stone interview which were probably considered extremely obscure by the general public, being a release inspired by his sleep paralysis, hallucinations, nightmares, and dreams; the release was met with a small but generally positive reaction from Bandcamp buyers, which had described the album as "an out-of-body connection to something in which I cannot explain."
Musical style, writing, and composition
Along with other vaporwave releases such as the previously mentioned Birth of a New Day and most of HKE's albums, Rain Temple is one of the first vaporwave releases to also present ambient characteristics in its composition, such as rain, as the album's name suggests. In an interview with the website Neon Dystopia, HKE compares both albums, stating that, although Birth of a New Day is the greatest album he was ever involved in, Rain Temple is, in his opinion, much more involving, dramatic, and cinematic, adding that the initial plan was to not make a "Birth of a New Day pt. 2," which Rain Temple "certainly didn’t end up being." In this interview, he further demonstrated the thoughts and emotions that motivate him and Telepath to continue the 2814 project, which are, in his own words, "life, the universe, the dreams, and the entities beyond our perception." On an interview for Bandcamp Daily, HKE revealed that he wanted to produce an album about "a sacred place away from our current reality... a reality we can’t perceive with our limited senses."