There is something particularly terrifying about not being able to trust yourself.
Not in the grand, dramatic sense. I mean those quieter moments when you know what you saw. You know what you heard. You know how something made you feel. And then, somehow, you find yourself asking: Did that actually happen? Am I seeing things?
That is where Delirium lives.
I wrote this record around the feeling of being haunted by something you can't quite prove is there. A person. A memory. An old version of yourself. Maybe all three.
There is a line in the song:
How can I tell what's for real?
I think that question became the center of everything.
The funny thing is, Delirium moves. It's loud. It's theatrical. It's ridiculous in places. You can shake your ass to it. You probably should. I have always believed that if I have something to say, I would much rather entertain you first. If you're not having a good time, why would you stay long enough to hear the message?
So I hid a psychological breakdown inside a dance record.
There are voices everywhere. Commands. Whispers. Laughter. People who may or may not be there. At one point I'm asking you to wave your hands just so I know I haven't completely lost my mind. Then I'm telling you to shake your rump.
That's Delirium.
The deeper I got into building its visual world, the more I kept returning to mirrors.
Not a broken mirror, necessarily.
A broken reflection.
That distinction became important to me. The glass can be perfectly intact while the person looking into it is fractured. You can stare directly at yourself and still not recognize what you're seeing.
And then came the line that seemed to explain the whole thing:
A fractured spirit will make an enemy of its own reflection.
That's when I knew what the cover had to be.
The hand. The mirror. The red. My face multiplied, refracted and interrupted. The viewer almost becomes the person holding the mirror up to me.
And the question becomes:
Is that actually me?
There are ghosts stuck in that mirror. There are disappearing acts. There are people I thought I knew. There are versions of myself I thought I knew. And somewhere between all of them is the person trying desperately to determine which one is real. Those images were already living inside the song long before they became the visual language around it.
Maybe that's why I didn't want the imagery to become horror. I'm not interested in monsters hiding behind the mirror.
I'm interested in what happens when the monster might be the reflection.
Or worse—
when there isn't a monster at all.
— TERRANCE DEAN