17.03.25

Finding freedom in the perverse once again, Haley Fohr, a.k.a. Circuit des Yeux, revels in primal, animalistic abandon to create a record that will stalk your nightmares.

Most musicians simply make albums, Haley Fohr, a.k.a. Circuit des Yeux, makes emergencies. Since releasing her debut, Symphone, in 2008, Fohr has made music that works on a molecular level, her howling, bleating, four-octave voice shaking the listener out of complacent passivity and into a state of alarm. On Halo on the Inside, her fifth album under the Circuit des Yeux moniker, the Chicago-based experimentalist takes that model to the nth degree, refusing to let a second of music resolve itself. She rips up the carpet from under every beat and bar, only allowing tiny glimmers of beauty to settle before shredding them to pieces. Terror is the album’s default mood and mode. 

Halo on the Inside is full of sharp noise work, timbral explosions and deconstructed 80s synth-pop soundscapes, but it’s her voice that serves as the focal point, taking you to places almost unbearable. Fohr’s music has always possessed a harrowing kind of power that most other musicians wouldn’t dare to aspire to. She refined that intensity on 2017’s more polished Reaching for Indigo, and honed it further on 2021’s lushly orchestrated -io, but here it explodes once again. Playing into her most demonic registers, Fohr performs with all the vengeance of a madwoman crawling out of the attic. 

There’s a great sense of uninhibitedness and playfulness across the record. For the first time, Fohr recorded in the late hours of the night, tinkering with synths and plugins until long past the point her brain had accepted its sleepless state and become giddy. The album begins with what sounds like a trapped creature banging on the inside of a large metal drum. Each thud strikes a little closer, Fohr’s voice mutant and smothered, before it breaks free and taunts us. Megaloner’s pre-chorus is a swathe of heavy distortion and feedback, the sound of a speaker catching flame, before some suitably dark influences creep in: think Throbbing Gristle meets Depeche Mode meets a loosed banshee. Fohr joins industrial grind with sticky melodies. It’s sinisterly tuneful and abrasive and howling all at once. “Gotta get a second chance/ Thinking about the big romance,” she sings, a force of nature. 

Fohr is ravenous on every track. Much of Halo on the Inside was inspired by a trip to Greece, where she developed an intellectual fascination for the lustful half-goat, half-god Pan. Embodying him, Fohr slips into an unholy erotic voice on Skeleton Key, leaving hoofmarks all over the track: “I need a synonym for skin,” she purrs, before taking a sharp inhale, “touching and looking! Touching and looking!” Horror movie strings burst. Fohr sounds at once panicked and unrepressed. She’s found the meeting point between terror and sex. 

Really, all of Halo on the Inside sounds like a wet nightmare. Fohr has such a theatrical conviction and talent for creating an unsettling atmosphere that any one of these songs could make a scene in a John Carpenter film ten times scarier (and abjectly sexier). The glitchy percussion throughout sounds like flies with ripped-off wings trying to flap. The grave piano sounds like a crab walking over the black keys of a piano. The revolving synths make every song feel claustrophobic and suffocating. Fohr even manages to unsettle the overfamiliar. On Organ Bed, she lays out all the chintziest 80s love song tropes: twinkly keys, driving percussion, even a sax solo, and explodes them into chaotic, broken noise. “You know the ocean’s no place for a person,” she sings with menace. 

On Halo on the Inside, Fohr has found freedom in the perverse. She’s the growling goat-god of our nightmares. In her newly bestial form, she’s never sounded so regenerated and spiritually integrated – so terrifyingly animal and alive.  

Emma Madden