As an artist, there are multiple ways to synthesize personal experiences into creative practice. For many, the focus is on creating a narrative inspired by emotions, but still cloaking them within a larger framework. Whether it is full concept albums like The Who’s Tommy, or more psychedelic, lyrical interpretations like Björk’s Debut, there’s almost always a veil over the artists’ work; a wall to create separation between them and their consumers. Northwest Indiana-based musician, Echo Alexander, has no such barriers. Particularly, their latest release, Nightmares That Have Become Reality, is blatantly vulnerable, detailing the self-proclaimed hardest year of the artist’s life and serving as their audible diary. The soundscape of the album refuses to be constrained by one genre, drawing on different conventions from its varied inspirations to ultimately create as haunting an auditory environment as possible.
“There Is No Middle,” for example, takes on a pulsing club beat. Yet unlike something you would actually hear in a club, with EDM peaks or beat drops, the track has an eerily unchanging bass line. It’s unrelenting, like the memories from one night just won’t leave the singer alone, stuck in the same chords eternally. The song becomes a caricature of the electronica genre it’s supposed to fit into, an underdeveloped world for the singer to project their insecurities into. This aligns with the lyrics, too, which are more relationship-focused. There are star-crossed lovers bitterly at odds, with their dynamic seemingly poisoned from the very start. Described in the song: “Right from the start, they were tеaring each other piecе by piece and thread by thread / One could be happy and the other one depressed, there was no way to meet in the middle.” As with many of the album’s tracks, the song is powerless in a very fresh way, blurred by the recency of the events that inspired the project. Listeners only have the singer’s perspective to go off of, and their belief in the status quo is unshakable. The lovers are declared as “never meant to be”, and so they are.
This feeling of passivity is especially highlighted in the shorter songs, like “Forget the Serotonin High, I Much Prefer The Void.” The track is dismal, openly admitting to being written from the hospital bed they speak about, “I cope in the bedroom writing out all of my dark thoughts.” The vocals are pitched up, airy, and detached from the hurt that they describe. While the project is littered with self-hatred, that doesn’t stop much of the pain from being directed outwards, too. Their tone isn’t angry in the way the lyrics might suggest, though. It’s simply monotone, listing out people in their life to blame; “I mean, doc, I’ve got nightmares yet you don’t explain why to me.” We settle in a place where the EP is most comfortable, inside their tortured psyche.
As Echo Alexander talks about extensively in the promotion for Nightmares That Have Become Reality, this EP was inspired by their BPD diagnosis and subsequent mental health spiral in 2025. As said best in the EP’s Genius profile, “This is not the usual project coming from Echo Alexander. Normally, they would make projects that consist of numerous genres that had no direction, no topic, no true reason to exist.” Nightmares That Have Become Reality differs with its distinct attempt to transcribe the intensity of their breakdown into music by replicating what their brain sounded like during the time. There’s no playing both sides or taking time to look at a situation objectively in Echo Alexander’s music. Instead, each track serves as an echo chamber for whatever the artist is feeling, allowing the emotion to evolve to its most extreme. While their mental health struggle is intense in a way I would never label as something as simple as relatable, the malaise displayed in the project is resonant with an often-discussed 21st-century condition, a helplessness to fix our lives because of factors put in place by generations prior. Throughout the gloomy lyrics, there’s a sense that the singer is cursed with this fate, incapable of escaping the cycle of destruction. There are consistent patterns in the lyrics, with repeated “I can’t” statements, or sentiments like, “It’s all my fault.” This type of thinking isn’t glamorized in any way. If anything, it’s played up to the point of no return by the last track on the album.
That song is “Nightmares That Have Become Reality,” which opens with light string instrumentals. They pluck out until the singer comes in, voice grating like the very act of speaking is painful. Many of the same ideas from the rest of the EP are re-emphasized here—the singer is alone and feels like they have no option but to permanently escape the prison they’ve built for themself. It feels incredibly final, in a way that’s fundamentally different from the rest of the album. For the other songs, when you’re not actively reading the lyrics, you can ignore much of the messaging and appreciate the really well put-together grungy beats. But here, the vocals are the star of the show, and their message is clear. On a meta-level, though, listeners can very easily take a look at any social media platform to see that Echo Alexander is very much still active. It lessens the impact slightly, while also helping to calm my conscience.
There’s an immediate parasociality to the rawness of this release. I felt concern for Echo Alexander in a way I haven’t for an artist in a while, sucked into just how unflinchingly honest their lyrics are. Nightmares That Have Become Reality almost begs for it, though, with how exposed the artist is. There’s no fanfare around the way they are feeling, and there are limited attempts to describe it poetically. It’s stated plainly and, therefore, concerningly. A part of me was compelled to listen to Echo Alexander’s discography, before and after this one. I needed to know if this was typical of the singer and what the next step could be after something so unabashedly dark. Two things became apparent quickly. Firstly, their complete work unfolds a distinct narrative of pushing beyond crisis and parsing through guilt. Secondly, this album does have its own framing. While it doesn’t shy away from emotions that may feel too real or scary to talk about in art, Nightmares That Have Become Reality has become an incubator for them. These feelings are fully scrutinized and teased out to their most dramatic, allowing for a future beyond themselves.
