Life on Loop

The signs of a quarter-life crisis aren't hard to spot: midnight Discord messages about creative fulfillment, endless conversations about "what if," and a growing folder of unfinished demos. That's how I found myself connecting with Sarmad on a music production server, both of us trying to figure out if we'd taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

What started as trading unfiinished demos evolved into longer conversations about identity, creativity, and the weight of expectations. We found ourselves sharing stories about growing up in immigrant families, about the tension between artistic ambitions and cultural pressures.

These late-night chats evolved into something unexpected. We realized we wanted to explore these thoughts through music, drawing from our shared influences across electronic, r&b, and rock. At the start of 2023, we ended up in Mexico City for six weeks with a group of musician friends, turning those conversations into songs.

The initial demos captured something raw about that period of reflection. Over the next two years, we slowly refined them, trying to preserve that core feeling while building out the sound we heard in our heads. Each stage of the process revealed new layers of what we were trying to express.

And as we worked on the music, a visual language naturally emerged. Each single's artwork became part of a larger story about internal change and growth. The circular motifs weren't really planned – they just felt right for what we were trying to say.

The songs move through different states of self-discovery: recognition, emergence, integration, and then back again. Working on them helped me understand my own cyclical patterns of growth and change.

When I heard the finished album at our Brooklyn listening party, I was struck by how many subtle connections had formed between the songs without us consciously planning them. Two years of work had woven together in ways we couldn't have predicted when we started.

Sarmad and I sat down during the listening party to talk more about the journey of making this album. The conversation captures a lot of the thoughts and experiences that went into the project, recorded in the moment just before sharing it with the world.

LIFE ON LOOP ended up being a document of this particular period of transition in my life. It's both more and less than what we initially set out to create – which feels fitting for a project about personal change.