Circuit des Yeux Announce New Album Halo on the Inside

This morning, Circuit des Yeux, the main musical project of Chicago singer and composer Haley Fohr, announced their fifth album, Halo on the Inside, due to arrive March 14 via Matador Records. It’s the band’s first release in three years, set to be the much-anticipated follow-up to 2021’s <em-io, which we named the 80th-best album of the 2020s so far. “-io is maximized and darkened, orchestral yet bold and boundless,” Matt Mitchell wrote. “[The album sounds] like an exorcism and an exodus all at once, as a 23-piece collection of strings, horns and drones transcribe the complicated, universal disasters of the self and the tangential microcosm of misery and catharsis.”

Halo on the Inside, the band’s first full release in over three years kicked off with the dark, dance inspired lead single “Megaloner.” Since Haley Fohr began the Circuit des Yeux project in 2007, she has refused the standards of genre classification. Evolving from the 12 string indie folk blues of her debut album Portrait in 2011, and past the synthscapes of In Plain Speech, Fohr swung at the complexity of a full-band sound on -io, her first release as a member of Matador Records’ roster. Throughout the project’s dynamic, two-decade career, every piece has sounded distinctly Circuit des Yeux. Why? Because of Haley Fohr’s incredible, operatic voice.

“Megaloner” puts Fohr’s vocals on full display in a reflective chamber of grinding synths and anxiously pulsing drums. It’s a boiler room death march—a song that would be right at home echoing throughout Nosferatu’s castle. Fohr talked about the track in a press release, saying that “Megaloner is an anthem for the place that exists after an action and inside its consequence. Prices are being paid and hope is our currency. I’m singing about endurance, faith, agency, and the singular, unbelievable path toward one’s own fate.”

The remainder of Halo on the Inside sees the band striking a balance between Fohr’s vocal solitude and an ensemble of maximal production. In writing the record, Fohr embraced the free hours of her night to explore new melodies and synth sounds from her basement studio, and took the myth of Pan, a flute playing half-goat, half-man, as context for the album’s overall mood. Meanwhile, a trip to Minneapolis with producer Andrew Broder (Bon Iver, Moor Mother, Lambchop) resulted in the record’s massive, unyielding energy.

Watch the video for “Megaloner,” see Circuit des Yeux’s upcoming tour dates, and check out the artwork and tracklist for Halo on the Inside below.