about the record

Inspired in part by Grad’s many collaborative projects over the past few years, Fobia collects and rearranges the music and sounds fostered within these collaborations to create an intimate, spiritually charged album—one that turns personal struggle into collective resistance and resilience. What began as a way for Grad to process her own experiences with agora- and claustrophobia, and to navigate feelings of shame and the pressure to hide them, evolved into a realization that mental health struggles are part of broader systems of collective suffering and injustice.

“It took a long time for me to discover that my issues were part of a system that produces these kinds of symptoms and that it takes a lot of courage to find a way around them. I have the feeling that more and more people suffer from these kinds of things in some way or another, and what was at first taught as something you should be silent about and keep private, I discovered that the more you talk about it and share it with people you trust, the more you realise that it’s part of something much bigger.”

This tension—the constant pull between fear and joy, light and dark—pervades the album. From the strained breathing in opening track “Yodo,” echoing the suffocating feeling of claustrophobia, to the lighter textures of “Obelisco Elysium” and “Prospero,” offering moments of relief, and the immersive, almost cacophonous sounds of “El Sol Mal,” reflecting the complex and often contradictory emotions of navigating mental health challenges.

Fobia invites listeners to move through pain with honesty, finding strength in shared experience.