KERUB Confronts Memory, Fear, and Queerness on Genre-Bending New Album APHANTASIA

Toronto-based artist KERUB delivers a breathtaking and deeply introspective experience with their sophomore album APHANTASIA, a work that’s as emotionally raw as it is sonically intricate. Fusing lush indie electronica, haunting glitch textures, and a philosophical lens on memory, nostalgia, and queerness, the record feels like a personal excavation into what it means to live without being able to clearly visualize the future—or the past.

The album's haunting lead single, “Calm,” distills that emotional urgency with clarity and restraint. Set in the aftermath of a panic attack, the song captures the eerie stillness that follows emotional chaos. “Calm” plays like the sound of a body trying to remember itself. “The heart of the song is that delicate moment when your heart finally slows and you’re left alone with the wreckage,” KERUB reveals.

Written in part as a master’s thesis, “Calm” emerged during a tumultuous period after KERUB relocated from the West Coast to Toronto. The disorienting sense of distance—from home, from routine, from the familiar—served as a wellspring for reflection. Feelings of displacement, grief, and uncertainty surfaced and eventually crystallized into music. “Calm” began in the haze of KERUB’s first panic attack, a moment of sharp bodily awareness and dissociation that became a doorway into a wider narrative about fragility, intimacy, and self-regulation.

KERUB’s move to Toronto forced a confrontation with what it means to belong—not just in a place, but in a body and in a time. Late-night phone calls with people left behind, emotionally charged conversations with those newly close, and the subtle shifts of everyday life all filter into the sonic language of the track. “With intimate vocals and instrumentals designed to feel both familiar and uncannily synthetic,” KERUB explains, “'Calm’ becomes a soft yet unflinching look at vulnerability, rendered with voyeuristic tenderness.”

The album’s larger architecture is no less ambitious. APHANTASIA takes its name from the condition of not being able to form mental images—and it’s also an emotional and aesthetic metaphor. The songs explore what it means to chase clarity in an increasingly unclear world. Drawing inspiration from Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Return, the album takes aim at nostalgia: its sweetness, its deception, and its danger. “It’s a broader challenge to hauntology’s cultural recycling,” KERUB explains. “What if we’re doomed to relive it all? And what might it mean to claw out a new home anyway?”

While the record is deeply personal—touching on KERUB’s experience growing up queer in suburban Vancouver—it’s also an intellectual work. Themes of memory, dissociation, time, and homecoming are approached through sound design as much as lyrics. Medieval vocal samples rub up against chopped beats. Analogue synths blur with modern software patches. It’s an album that refuses to pick a lane, and that refusal becomes a kind of identity in itself.

KERUB’s ability to balance the cerebral with the vulnerable defines the record’s emotional center. “Throughout the writing, this theme of continuity kept popping up,” they reflect. “I’m not sure the entire album orients around resilience, but it kept appearing regardless. The story I’m trying to tell is that you can find beauty in memories without wanting to ever live them again. Even if you can’t imagine a future, you can still create one.”

Recorded largely during their studies at the University of Toronto, the album is a product of both improvisation and intention. KERUB made use of borrowed equipment, editing in hallways between classes, and repurposing early project recordings—including a classroom take on Josquin des Prez’s “El Grillo.” The lo-fi methods lend the record a surprising intimacy and highlight its core belief: art can happen anywhere, even in the liminal spaces.

APHANTASIA marks KERUB’s first release with KOPI Records (Montreal/Tehran) and serves as their most cohesive and daring work yet. As a producer, singer, and genre shapeshifter, KERUB (CARE-ub) continues to explore the blurry lines between memory and fiction, comfort and risk, past and possible future.

With this release, KERUB doesn’t just confront what it means to feel unmoored—they build something solid from it. APHANTASIA is the sound of someone forging a future from uncertainty, one breath at a time.