Circuit des Yeux’s Glorious New LP Is Modern-Day Alchemy » PopMatters

Circuit des Yeux’s work, including her singular voice, conjures the grand epics, the metamorphoses that the ancients whispered and sang about.

Halo on the Inside Circuit des Yeux Matador 14 March 2025

With 2017’s Reaching for Indigo, Haley Fohr, aka Circuit des Yeux, showcased her compositional savvy, crossing folk and avant-garde leanings. The album also spotlighted her voice in a way that previous projects hadn’t, her emotional and technical range on glorious display. 2020’s Jacqueline (released under her Jackie Lynn moniker) captured Fohr steering a rawer sound while adopting an edgy and punk-informed swagger.

2021’s—io, in turn, further mined Reaching for Indigo‘s adventurous leanings and Jacqueline‘s bravado. Fohr worked with a 24-piece orchestra, reveling in sublime string and brass mixes, fuzzy guitars, and free-jazz-inflected percussion. Her songs were hookier than ever, her voice alternately plunging into Tartarean depths and soaring to stratospheric heights.

With her new record, Halo on the Inside, Fohr continues to investigate fertile paradoxes and syntheses. From the opening track, “Megaloner”, she exhibits her flair for juxtaposing weighty, industrial-tinged rhythms and delicate melodies. “I just want you to know me,” she proclaims, moving effortlessly from lower to higher pitches, her vocal reverberating within a frame of fuzzy synths, trebly accents, and mechanistic percussion.

There’s an irony to her declaration: while Fohr’s work rings with authenticity, she’s also a master of persona, her voice as chameleonic as any in the pop domain. Additionally, her delivery, at least post-Indigo, tends to be heavily garbed, prominent yet still veiled by a battery of sounds and textures.

“Canopy of Eden” is built around a bass-led rhythm. Fohr broadcasts her attunement to new-generation dystopianism a la Heartworms or Mandy, Indiana as well as the fundamentals of hook-oriented pop. Fohr has always flirted with the overlap between the celestial and tragic, the ethereal and muddy, the concert hall and warehouse. Here, and throughout Halo, she navigates these integrations as deftly as ever, her voice soaring above, then crashing into glitchy rhythms.

“Skeleton Key” spotlights Fohr’s vocal nuances, her ability to stir sublime emotions with a simple phrase. Stylistically, she occasionally recalls Arooj Aftab, though whereas Aftab points to the mystical or spiritual, Fohr is more often oriented to the visceral and earthy. “Go ahead and take it off / and dance for me,” she sings, accompanied by a chorus-dabbed piano and elegant strings. Her voice embraces theatrical and/or operatic traditions, evoking terror, romance, and, at moments, an eerie indifference. Midway, the track shifts into a distortion-drenched anthem, Fohr offering her take on transcendent metal, a reconfiguration of everything from Dream Theater to Zola Jesus to Chelsea Wolfe to Swans.

“Anthem of Me” digs deeper into noise templates and unfurls as an exercise in contrasts. Fohr is bathed in and pummeled by crunchy sounds, her voice reaching cloud-ward as roiling instrumentation bogs down, releases, and bogs down again. “Cathexis”, on the other hand, is a more austere track, Fohr pairing Gregorian-like vocal lines with a crackly mix that brings to mind beasts growling in a confessional booth. The holy and unholy. The angelic and demonic. The metronomic and anarchic.

“Truth”, too, is founded on drones, repetitions, and glitches. Much like Arca or even SOPHIE, Fohr is as intrigued with the tangential as she is with crafting compelling cohesion.

Halo on the Inside closes with “It Takes My Pain Away”, which lands like an empyreal coda, the redemption following a process of suffering and initiation. Smooth synths stretch across an open sonic field. Understated echoes land as soothing ripples. The feeling is moving beyond the body, beyond karma, perhaps being realigned with and reclaimed by cosmic energy, oneness, the divine.

Circuit des Yeux has long been sensitive to the way archetypal energies play out in the human psyche. With Halo on the Inside, she again explores aesthetic poles—the clamorous and subdued, dramatic and restrained, tense and cathartic. Her work, including her singular voice, conjures the grand epics, the metamorphoses that the ancients whispered and sang about. Fohr is grounded in timeless magic, functioning as a modern-day alchemist.