Interview: Kristy Chmura stretches her voice into the cosmos

Kristy Chmura‘s “Eye of the Storm” haunts your dreams. From its thrashing guitars and moody underpinning to Chmura’s otherworldly vocal tone, something unsettling happens when you let the cataclysmic new track wash over you. It’s a communal experience, as the singer-songwriter reaches deep within her body and soul to unleash an earth-shattering performance. It’s equal parts enchanting and eerie.

Written sometime between late 2019 and early 2020, “Eye of the Storm” immerses the listener in waves of dark emotions and also gives Chmura a chance to “tend to my feelings, especially the emotional pain,” she tells B-Sides & Badlands. “It was more of a cathartic release. It gave me a place to put my feelings into something that became uplifting for me. My favorite thing about writing any song is the therapeutic aspect of it and how it allows me to create a space to process heavy emotions.”

Born out of immense heartache, the sky-bound song finds Chmura realizing “that even pain can be a gift,” she says. Even more, her misery soaked into her bones in a way where she found herself “struggling physically. I tend to feel things deeply and can get stuck in the heartache which then affects my ability to focus on everyday tasks. I lost my appetite, and I was tired most of the time. I felt somewhat detached from my body at times.”

When the dark period evaporated, she was left confused and wandering through the ruin of her existence. In the aftermath, the spaces were “filled with self-reflection and relearning parts of myself that I thought I understood already – but it was also a transformative time.”

With “Eye of the Storm,” Chmura preps a forthcoming album titled Inner Soltice, on which she worked with Depeche Mode’s Christian Eigner. The lead-in ignites her “journey into my dark night of the soul; we all will have moments in our lives that will break our hearts,” she describes. “I sometimes picture Lord of The Rings when Frodo says, ‘I wish the ring never came to me,’ but it was his destiny.”

Chmura mirrors back her heartache in “Eye of the Storm,” a “catalyst for my descent into the ‘underworld’ of my psyche on my quest to become more fully aware of my being.”

The songs etched into the record emerge with their own “distinct character,” as she puts it. Fitting snuggly together, musically, it reads “like chapters in a book,” she adds.

Inner Solstice arrives later this year.

Listen to “Eye of the Storm” below.

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