Some albums take time to unfold; others land with an immediate sense of purpose. Halo On The Inside does both. It feels inevitable yet elusive, shifting shape with each listen. Circuit des Yeux, aka Haley Fohr, has always been in motion, her music projects echoing her multi-disciplinary approach to art, balancing grandeur and intimacy, structure and instinct. But here, she doesn’t just navigate change—she embodies it.
If 2021’s -io was a vast, orchestral elegy, Halo On The Inside is its shadow-world twin. Where -io towered with its 23-piece orchestral scope, Halo moves with the electronic pulse of a restless city at night. It’s the club to -io’s concert hall, the primal instinct to its intellect, the visceral body to its enlightened consciousness.
Fohr recorded the album in Minneapolis at Bathtub Shrine Studio, working alongside Andrew Broder (formerly of Fog, and known for work with Bon Iver, Poliça, Lambchop), but its origins stretch back to something more solitary. She spent months alone in the deep hours, writing in her basement, allowing the hush of 3 A.M. to pull melodies from the subconscious. These graveyard-shift sessions shaped Halo into something looser, freer—an album as much about discovery as it is about intent.
That sense of instinct is immediate. Halo leads with its two singles, ‘Megaloner’ strides in first, driven by a throbbing synth bassline that churns like hellish machinery. “Fate in all the fires you make”, Fohr cries, the phrase turning over like a spell. The tension between destiny and self-determination runs deep in Halo, echoed in the way ‘Canopy of Eden’ resists the rigid pulse of its own chase-scene beat, as if breaking free of its form.
But this album isn’t just about shifting sound—it’s about shifting self. ‘Skeleton Key’ is more intimate, Fohr’s voice stretching around the vulnerability of the line: “I need a synonym for skin, the naked feeling of giving in.” It’s a song that sits ambiguously between strength and surrender, between knowing and wanting—one of the album’s many moments where language feels like it’s grasping at something just out of reach. ‘Skeleton Key’ builds dramatically leading us to a cliff-edge and a choice: “Enter the room of nothing / enter the room of me/ and do you trust me?” she asks.
The vocal range Fohr explores here feels fresh, even for her. There are moments where she lets her voice soften, rise, flicker—most noticeably on the dark disco-funk of ‘Truth’, where it skirts around an unexpected falsetto. But there’s also a raw physicality that wasn’t quite as present on -io — an openness, a letting go. On ‘Cathexis’ that voice is entwined with rich, genre-blurring production that at first feels like it’s being coaxed from another dimension, before descending into gristly glossolalia and banshee calls. Layers of shimmering synths build toward a raw, soaring release, as Broder’s guitar arcs through the haze, striking like a final burst of light before vanishing into the ether.
Much of the album’s momentum comes from its constant push and pull, but it’s in the quiet fractures, the spaces in between, where Halo reveals its most devastating moments. On ‘Cosmic Joke’, over a deconstructed, pitch-shifted piano, Fohr sings: “I know the face an actor makes when he’s losing.” The line lands like a gut punch—an image of performance slipping, of self-deception unraveling. There’s a heavy sadness there, a recognition of the roles we play, the illusions we build. But the song isn’t just about loss—it’s also about the unbearable stillness of being stuck: “I’m in a place where nothing starts, just stops”. For all its existential weight, Halo On The Inside is, at its core, an album about love—“Plain and simple,” Fohr has said. But not the easy kind – the kind that starts with self love. There’s an urgency here, an ache to push through inertia, to reconnect, drop the masks and see each other more clearly.
If Halo has an anthem, it’s ‘Anthem of Me’, a song charged with pagan wildness, its blaring horns a call to arms. The mythological influence is subtle but potent—Fohr has referenced Pan, the trickster god of transformation and untamed nature, and his presence ripples through both the music and its striking visual aesthetic, co-created with artist Dana Trippe. On the album cover, Fohr sits in a warped, empty room, her hair sculpted into curved horns, a figure both human and mythical. The image is a snapshot of something in flux—where -io’s album cover showed Fohr falling into the abyss, Halo presents her standing still as the world transforms around her.
The album’s closing stretch is, at first, unexpectedly subdued given what preceded it. ‘Organ Bed’ floats into view, suspended in weightlessness, Fohr singing: “You know the ocean is no place for a person, and if you could wrap your arms around me, I know you would.” The song drifts, momentarily unmoored, before a rippling bass line and skittering rhythms pull it backward, toward the body, toward something tangible, before finally releasing it “deep into infinity”. Its final moments feel ecstatic and illuminating — stars colliding in a synthesis of energy and emotion.
It feels like an ending, but Halo on the Inside resists closure.
Instead, it drifts away through “It Takes My Pain Away”, a soft instrumental wash that doesn’t end so much as it dissolves, cleansing the space for whatever comes next. It leaves the door open, inviting us to step back in, to listen again, to find something new waiting in its wake.
And that’s the most striking thing about Halo On The Inside — it’s refusal to contain itself. Where past Circuit des Yeux albums shaped themselves around a singular vision, this one feels open-ended yet all-encompassing. There’s also an undeniable confidence here, a convergence of everything Fohr has explored before—the operatic power of -io, the rhythmic momentum of Jackie Lynn, the raw intimacy of her early work. But it doesn’t rest on those past selves. It moves forward. And more than anything, she sounds fearless. She sounds free.
‘Halo On The Inside’ is released on 14th March, on Matador Records.
