This spring, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, a revelation that brought on a long period of self-reflection. I realized how much of my life I've spent masking: socially, emotionally, and creatively. I’ve created and discarded so many versions of myself in an attempt to be liked, to be accepted, or to try and pass for “normal.” And somewhere along the way, I started masking my creativity too.
Someone once told me, “No one wants to hear your existential crisis on stage.”
I took that to heart, and I buried more pieces of myself.
Dark Matter is the result of unmasking and excavating that narrative from my mind. It’s a solo journey by design through discarded songs I wrote from 2017 onward. These are the creative pieces of myself that I once thought were too weird for this world. Revisiting these songs with a new understanding of myself, I found a trove of abandoned works about black holes, quantum entanglement, data loss, and the emotional physics of being misunderstood. I rebuilt each song, and in doing so, I started to rebuild myself.
I’m far from a stellar guitarist, bass player, or beatmaker. But I needed this work to be mine alone, representing parts of myself that I've kept hidden all these years. Dark Matter is weird, it’s vulnerable and flawed, and it’s probably a little bit too obsessed with space. But it’s also the proudest work of my life, because for the first time I'm not afraid to fully be myself.
Whether you’re neurodivergent, neurotypical, or somewhere in between, I think we all know what it feels like to be told we’re too much or not enough. This album is for anyone who’s ever felt that way.
