Simi Fyda Channels Claustrophobic Textures on New Album ‘In My Personal Heaven, I’m the Devil’s Spawn’

Simi Fyda’s latest, In My Personal Heaven, I’m the Devil’s Spawn, trades the vivid contrasts of 2023’s Yuri for a more concentrated, almost airless sound. The album unfolds in a narrow palette, building tension from microscopic variations in timbre, pressure, and pitch.

Opening with “-may-care,” it sets a metallic coldness that never fully lifts. “maso chords” hints at nostalgia, but the memory stays irretrievable. The sequence grows steadily more constricted: “idle hands” simmers without release, while “hedo chords” circles around obsessive intervals. By “mono chords,” repetition becomes the subject, tonal inflections reshaping the surface until the music traps itself in its own logic—claustrophobia without excess.

Originally conceived as an octophonic installation, the stereo version carries an enclosed character, where sounds seem unable to disperse. Repeated gestures linger, each return heavier. Even faint vocal traces dissolve back into the dense harmonic field.

The closing “take the hindmost” provides the only real shift, redirecting attention toward texture through layers of electronic residue. Nothing resolves. Instead, the album erases its own traces, leaving behind only the memory of sounds that refused to disappear. Fyda has spoken of the record emerging from a period of isolation, where she couldn’t access what she normally relied on, and later reshaping it brutally—cutting much but retaining the atmosphere that “annoyingly” stuck. The result is an album that feels haunted by its earlier self, tightening inward until it nearly implodes.