Circuit des Yeux – Halo on the Inside
Haley Fohr is in touch with her dark side. That’s maybe a bit of an understatement; the Chicago singer/songwriter has crafted more than half a dozen records of eerily expressive art-pop as Circuit des Yeux, steeped in drone and avant garde dissonance, and made breathtaking through her four-octave vocal range. Yet even at her music’s most devastating, there’s always been a kernel of something more approachable to be found within the folds of its black velvet drapes. Never before had this been more apparent than on “Dogma,” the standout single from 2021’s emotionally intense -io, not necessarily a source of light so much as a hit of adrenaline—the joy of movement amid a descending spiral.
It’s in this more ecstatic darkness where Fohr finds herself on Halo on the Inside, wherein she embraces all things gothic and reshapes her sound with the flexibility and fluidity of the dancefloor. She arrived here via a new approach to her work that found her literally taking on a night shift, writing these nine songs between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. while the city transitioned from lucid and electric to silent and still. And in the process, she arrived upon “the intimate beat of sex, love, and melody,” as she described it in a statement.
Circuit des Yeux’s aesthetic palette has comprised everything from stark guitar-and-voice dirges to feats of operatic, string-laden grandeur, but on Halo on the Inside, Fohr shifts to one of thick, fuzzed-out basslines and shimmering, psychedelic effects. It’s at once more sinister and seductive, the full effect of which takes shape in opening track “Megaloner.” It awakens through a heavy electronic stomp and a big throbbing bassline, its slowly creeping industrial darkwave kissed with a trace of Violator-era Depeche Mode guitar twang. Yet despite its imposing and ferocious sound, “Megaloner” harbors some of Fohr’s most subtly breathtaking vocals and intimately romantic lyrics alike: “Just want you to know me/In time you’ll see me through all things dreamy.”
The haunted power that Fohr harnesses on Halo on the Inside takes various forms, at times subtle and graceful (“Cathexis”), at others strikingly erotic, as when Fohr sings “Go on, take it off/Dance for me” against neon-lit keyboards and smoke rings of piano on “Skeleton Key.” Yet while Circuit des Yeux’s avant garde bona fides are well established, it’s the songs that find Fohr fully embracing a twisted kind of pop that are often the strongest. She pairs tense, post-punk guitars with the twinkling glow of ’80s pop synths and a heroic saxophone solo on “Organ Bed,” and “Truth” gets all of its muscle from an absolute slapper of a bassline, providing a foundation for Fohr’s psychedelic soothsayings: “truth is just imagination of the mind.” And she’s never made a song that goes as hard as “Canopy of Eden,” a pulsing monster of dancefloor goth that comes with a delicious threat: “I can make a radio, I can make a radio, I can make a radio—break.”
It’s never breezy, only occasionally gentle and more often than not snarling with an undercurrent of terror, but Halo on the Inside harbors a mischievously playful side of Circuit des Yeux. Where before her music often felt physical in the sense of an exorcism, here that physicality extends to the limbs and the hips. Fohr sums it up succinctly enough against a wall of distortion in “Anthem of Me”: “It will rock you.”
Label: Matador
Year: 2025
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Circuit des Yeux – Halo on the Inside
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