The dressing room before a show is a strange, liminal space—time is short, minds are focused, and the stage looms. Haley Fohr, the force behind Circuit des Yeux, is backstage in Manchester when we speak over Zoom. She’s getting ready to open for Alan Sparhawk, but despite the pre-show rush, she is thoughtful, warm, and open—even laughing as she admits to an unexpected challenge of this tour.:
“It’s awkward sometimes,” she says. “I’m not sure what to do with my hands yet because I’m so used to holding a guitar.”
That guitar—Boom, as she calls it—is still part of her world, but for now, this short run of shows has Fohr performing solo, a shift from the full-on intensity of her previous record -io with its grand orchestral arrangements for strings, brass, piano and organ. It’s an evolving process, one that will soon take another form when she takes Halo on the Inside on the road with a band next month.
“We’ve had some practices already,” she says. “The songs are pretty true to the recording, but there’s definitely some growth. I’m really excited to see where that goes.”
The setup will be a hybrid of electronics and live instrumentation—acoustic and electronic drums, bass, guitar, and Fohr back on guitar and vocals.
“So more of a rock band formation than previously,” she adds.
“So really loud?” I ask.
She grins. “Yes.”
…the joy is in the process
Fohr has described her pre-album single ‘God Dick’ as “a chrysalis,” a passage from the past into something new. With Halo on the Inside, the transformation is complete.
With the album release just around the corner, I ask if she has any personal rituals for marking the occasion. She nods.
“There’s such a build-up, you know?” she says. “I like to mark the moment by taking myself out for dinner—there’s a place in Chicago called Bavette’s that I really like. Just a little way to say, ‘You did it.’”
Beyond that, she keeps things in perspective.
“I try not to have expectations,” she adds. “The joy is in the process, as cheesy as that sounds.”
This idea—of process over control, of embracing the unknown—runs through the way she speaks about her work. There’s a push-pull between meticulousness and instinct, between the deliberate shaping of sound and the unexpected ways it reshapes itself.
Nowhere is this clearer than on ‘Cathexis‘, the album’s centrepiece. A song that took time to find its form.
“I really didn’t like that song for a long time,” she admits. “I couldn’t figure out what to do with the voice.”
Things eventually took shape, bouncing ideas back and forth with producer Andrew Broder, a collaboration that, by Fohr’s account, was both intense and deeply creative.
“It was a total conversation,” she explains. “I would write a demo. Or Andrew would send me a beat. And it was like, full idea—sent. Another idea—sent. Delete, delete.”
She laughs, but there’s an underlying seriousness in how she describes the process.
“I always had carte blanche in terms of what ended up being the ‘thing’, but I think we both made compromises,” she says. “We come from different places—he’s really good with electronics and Ableton and computer stuff, and I’m a little more… poetic. In the flesh, or something.”
Fohr explains how Cathexis – a term describing intense emotional fixation – also carries deep personal weight.
“The idea of cathexis came to me through reading and also through experiencing,” she explains. “I have this personality trait where, if someone shows interest in me, I feel a responsibility to mirror that and reciprocate. And that can be a winding road.”
The song has a middle section with a guttural “made-up language”, something she describes as both fun and unsettling—a place where meaning dissolves and something new takes shape.
“Yeah, now I like the gauziness of it. It’s fun. It’s dark and also bright,” she concludes.
An artist’s dream…
Beyond the music, Halo on the Inside exists as a fully realized visual world, something Fohr crafted in deep collaboration with artist Dana Trippe.
“The album cover is sort of a depiction of Pan, this Pagan and Greek god who is half goat, half man,” she says. “To me, he’s this anti-hero figure that I became obsessed with.”
But Pan’s presence is more than aesthetic—it reflects Fohr’s fascination with mythology, transformation, and the idea of shedding external expectations. She describes the album’s imagery as an exploration of the layers of identity that accumulate over time, shaped by the world around us.
“The idea is that we all have this collection of things that society and civilization put on us,” she explains. “I wanted to explore what it means to remove that and have this intrinsic pureness.”
Trippe played a major role in translating those themes into imagery, particularly in the album’s striking cover art.
“Dana was really poetic about it,” Fohr recalls. “There was a lot of evolution with the horns—at first, it was going to be a headband, then antlers. Eventually, we ended on hair. It was beautiful.”
The final image—Fohr draped in black, seated in a warped, shrinking room—mirrors the tension of the album itself.
“It’s an artist’s dream to have that kind of canvas,” she says. “Really three-dimensional.”
Kindness is a weapon…
At one point in our conversation, Fohr pauses, then offers something unexpected.
“I have an urge to tell people to just be nice,” she says. “I know that sounds really cheesy, but kindness is a weapon. Especially in these times—it can go really far. I think that’s kind of what carried me through making this record. And what makes it what it is.”
Before we wrap up, I ask about one of the album’s central ideas: rewinding to a time before fear. If she could play Halo On The Inside to her younger self, what would she think?
“I think she’d think ‘that girl is really cool,'” she says, smiling. “I think she’d love that music.”
And, what if this album were a capsule sent into the future, waiting to be found?
“I mean… a warm feeling of home,” she says after a pause. “Something really warm and safe. That’s what I would hope someone would feel when they open it up.”
All images credit: Dana Trippe
