Apex4X. Right, let’s dive in. “The Fire Within”, an album with thirteen tracks; feels like peering into someone’s journal, but one that’s written in neon ink and scrawled across a storm-ridden sky. It’s not a straight path, this emotional rollercoaster, more like a particularly scenic, but also slightly terrifying, cliffside drive. The whole thing drips with this fascinating paradox – personal pain delivered with a kind of theatrical grandeur.

You get the sense of someone returning from far-off places, not with souvenirs, but with soul-scars. “The Fire Within,” the title track, is all unrequited yearning – it’s the feeling of reaching out into the dark and grabbing a fistful of nothing but the echo of a maybe. Then “The Tease” slaps you awake with this almost dangerous, seductive power. You feel the pull, the kind where gravity just doesn’t apply to the senses anymore. It reminds me a bit of those old silent movies where actors just use their eyes to tell stories.

“Haunted,” follows on and the heaviness settles in. Loss. It’s a weighted blanket of sorrow, one you don’t want to wear but also can’t seem to take off. Suddenly you are “Lost in the Fall.” The music is swirling with the intensity of a storm-driven sea as you’re pulled down, not by gravity, but by something that feels oddly magnetic and just… wrong but irresistibly so. There are places you know you should not visit, but some landscapes seem more enticing than others in the dead of night, no? The musical undercurrent runs through with the persistent feeling of the aftermath, the agony after. This emotional residue seems to keep things from moving forward or out. “Meeting in the Middle”, then tries to break through. It’s about wanting to just give into it all and being submerged and losing any semblance of being in control.

There’s this incredible raw quality, it is all these feelings and moments colliding within an alt-rock framework. It feels fragmented, the songs like pieces of stained glass in a cosmic puzzle, and that’s not a criticism, it’s the point, maybe? I don’t think I’m sure. Or do I? But that’s life, isn’t it, this weird, beautiful mess. It’s Apex4X just laying it all out, with all its jagged edges and hidden depths. And you know what, sometimes those are the most fascinating places to be.

What does a lighthouse know about the depths of the ocean, really? Apex4X makes you think about that. And other random questions of the universe and everything in it.

Follow Apex4X on YouTube.