“Enter the room of nothing / Enter the room of me,” sings Haley Fohr on ‘Skeleton Key’, backed by the buzz of organ and electric guitar. She towers above, her voice theatrical and macabre, a quality that’s always been there in her contralto delivery, but never as bombastic.
That room could be the basement studio in Chicago where Halo on the Inside first took shape. For eight months, she locked herself away there, embarking on long, late-night writing sessions. Like the record’s cover, she existed in a vacuum, exploring new sounds, synths and parts of herself. Time and place get wobbly when you’re up all night on your own in a windowless room. Fohr found power in that altered state of isolation. The basement became a creative cocoon, a place to rediscover herself.
Musically, that reinvention is clear in the record’s gutsy turn to shades of industrial, rave, goth and pitch-black drama. Her previous record, 2020’s i-o, was a spectacle. With its orchestral sweep, she made the crushing emptiness of grief into something more tangible. With its many players and multi-phase compositions, it formed a gorgeous landscape out of messy and difficult emotions.
Halo on the Inside instead opts for beastly physicality, and is even grander than what’s come before. It takes the shape of a character study, one which makes its central performer gargantuan. The study of Fohr’s internal world is cosmic in scope. That could make for an imposing listen, so it’s impressive that the record also stands as her most instantly loveable collection of songs.
The opening duo ‘Megaloner’ and ‘Canopy of Eden’ might be dark and dense with their throbbing synths and horror-flick chords, but their choruses have a light pop touch to make the dread addictive to revisit. Fohr is somewhere between seductive and villainous on ‘Megaloner’ as she plays an ominous narrator warning us of a mysterious but inevitable doom. ‘Canopy of Eden’ instead maps her shift into a benevolent messenger (“I am a trumpet and I have arrived”.) There’s a propulsive club quality that’s moulded to fit Circuit des Yeux’s timeless and often slippery approach to genre. Just as slippery are her words. Never a directly autobiographical writer, Fohr opts for eerie images and prompts which unlock rabbit holes for the listener to follow.
Through its isolated creation, Fohr’s lyrics have picked up a self-reflective tone that grows steadily more surreal and solipsistic as the record takes monstrous new forms. On ‘Anthem of Me’, she’s in a maze of herself (“come see what is surrounding / it’s an anthem of me”). She sings through swirling noise and percussion pounding in slow motion. Her voice is unwavering, quite happy to bask in that feedback loop: “It’s an anthem of me / It will rock you,” she concludes with a grin.
The song’s fluttering piano outro is one of many clever moments where an unadorned organic instrument flashes through the murk and reveals new depth to the arrangement. The same is felt on ‘Cathexis’, when Andrew Broder’s guitar duets with Fohr’s ghostly backmasked vocal as the song lifts out of desolation into a hopeful major resolution. The off-kilter vocal is one of the record’s many successful experiments. Here, she proves that even when her voice is smudged and obscured from view, it beckons you closer.
The biggest experimental swing might be ‘Truth’, a gothic dance tune that rests on an enlighted central phrase: “truth is just imagination of the mind”. That could easily be an eye-roll if the song wasn’t so immaculately crafted. You go with it. It recalls the rave from The Matrix in its endearing camp and undeniable swagger. The groove is tight and propulsive, with its slap bass, hand percussion and layers of echo – but again, it’s Fohr’s central presence that makes the song work. She’s bold and committed as a performer, digging into the bottom of her range when needed, or chanting in venomous blasts.
In the record’s latter half, ‘Organ Bed’ takes a moment of intimacy and bursts it wide open. “If you could wrap your arms around me / deep into infinity / I know you would,” Fohr sings. The song’s quickening pace and constant upward motion carries the loss and majesty of those lines, until we’re put in a state of emergency wondering what that infinity might hold.
The album ends with ‘It Takes My Pain Away’, a needed exhale, where one gorgeous chord sequence reveals new specks of light in each repetition. The droning organ beneath is slow and heavy, comforting in its enveloping weight. Fohr becomes an apparition, her voice stretched into a breathy texture as she returns to the world outside.
Halo on the Inside is an album that could only be made well into an established career, by an artist given the time to explore and the budget to pull off their lofty ambition. In that spirit, it’s a case study of what can be done when following your creative impulses without restriction.
While there’s impressive heft to the arrangements and endless layers to unpick, the greatest treasures come from inside its creator. Back on ‘Skeleton Key’, supporting pieces melt away for a moment. Fohr is left alone with a guitar working through her process. “I need a synonym for ‘skin’ / that naked feeling of giving in / of touching and looking,” she muses, elongating each vowel sound like she’s searching for that sensation. We’re there with her, as she grapples with creation for a moment. Then the record erupts again, and her thoughts spill out in front of us as fragments of guitar, voice and percussion. The internal is pushed outwards, to the benefit of all listening.
