A Quick Chat with Marx Major

‘Disorder’ feels both cinematic and deeply personal. When did the concept first begin to take shape, and how did you know this was the story you wanted to tell through your debut album?

Disorder began in the ruins, not in a single moment, but in the slow collapse. When I fell, the world didn’t rush to catch me; it watched. The silence that followed was deafening. When I needed people the most, it became the loneliest time of my life. There isn’t just stigma with mental illness; there’s judgement, a quiet kind of disgust, and a fear that makes people turn away. That isolation stripped me bare. I’d never felt so small, so unseen.
But Disorder isn’t only about that fall. It’s about what comes after and what came before, what it means to live in the aftermath of pain. The album became my attempt to understand how trauma reshapes a person and how nurture and neglect, love and abandonment, can coexist inside the same body. Each song is a fragment of that search. I didn’t want to just write about survival; I wanted to explore what happens when survival becomes the only language you know. Disorder is a portrait of that experience: a world built from everything that breaks and everything that remains.
But Disorder didn’t stay in that darkness. I was fortunate to have a team who believed in the vision when I could barely see it myself. Harri Harding helped me translate emotion into sound; he gave shape to the chaos, found melody inside the noise. And Vuli, from True Vibenation, stood beside me through every step, ensuring that what people see reflects what they feel. Their belief helped me find my own voice again. I also want to say a huge thank you to Grimrose, Cleo, Pip, and Jack Prest for their remarkable contributions to the album.

You’ve described the album as a kind of mirror reflecting the failures of the mental health system. How did you go about translating that critique into sound — from the production choices to the lyrical structure?

I didn’t want to talk about the system; I wanted people to feel what it’s like to live inside it. When I was creating Disorder, I thought a lot about what silence sounds like when no one believes you or how it feels when you are no longer treated with dignity. The production became a language for that. The distortion, the static, and the moments where beauty fractures into noise are all metaphors for what it feels like to navigate a system built to contain, not to heal.
Lyrically, I tried to write from the inside looking out. I wanted the listener to experience the confusion, the circular thinking, and the exhaustion of trying to explain your pain to people who are conditioned not to hear it. The verses don’t always resolve; some thoughts repeat, and some fall apart mid-sentence. That’s deliberate. It mirrors the disorientation of being institutionalised, medicated, and analysed. In that sense, Disorder isn’t just a critique; it’s a reconstruction of the soundscape that neglect leaves behind.

Across tracks like “Lost Soul” and “Annie,” there’s a recurring tension between beauty and chaos. Was that contrast something you built intentionally from the start, or did it evolve naturally as you worked on the record?

That contrast was always there, even before I realised it. Beauty and chaos have always existed in the same room for me; they feed each other. When I wrote Annie, I wasn’t trying to make something tragic; I was trying to understand how love becomes distorted when it’s filtered through pain. There’s a strange kind of beauty in that confrontation, when you finally see the truth for what it is, even if it breaks you.
With Lost Soul, that tension moved outward. It became about identity: what happens when you grow up between worlds and belong to neither. The music had to hold both those realities — the beauty of searching for connection and the chaos of knowing you might never find it.
Harri Harding, an incredible musician and producer, helped me build these songs to reflect that duality: soft melodies that are constantly interrupted and rhythms that collapse under their own weight. That’s what life feels like sometimes — something delicate trying to survive inside the noise. Harri was also instrumental in the creation of Disorder. Everything was recorded with him, under his supervision and expertise. He gave me the freedom to be completely open and transparent, and he believed in the record.

The album unfolds almost like a psychological film — immersive, at times claustrophobic. What role did visual storytelling play in shaping Disorder?

Visuals were everything. In a way, I saw the sound as imagery before I heard it as music. Each track on Disorder began as a scene — fragments of light, motion, or memory. Admission was fluorescent lights buzzing in a ward that never sleeps. Everyday felt like staring at your reflection until you don’t recognise the person looking back. The Descent was a staircase with no bottom, a place where every thought echoes but never lands.
I wanted the album to move like a film with no camera, where the listener becomes both the observer and the subject. The claustrophobia, the disorientation, and even the moments of stillness were all framed that way. The idea was that by the end, the listener wouldn’t just hear the story; they’d experience it — maybe even feel trapped inside of it. That’s what living with mental illness can feel like: being both the storyteller and the scene of a crime.

Each single released so far feels like a chapter in a larger narrative. How did you approach sequencing and flow to ensure the album works as one cohesive body of work?

When Disorder started to take shape, it felt like a journey through a single consciousness — one that starts with a whimper and ends with a shout. The order of the tracks was not random; it mirrors that descent. Admission is the entry point, where everything feels sterile and new, and by the time you reach The Note, you’ve walked through every layer of the mind: the denial, the rage, the reflection, and the surrender.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how each song bleeds into the next, not just sonically but emotionally. Trauma doesn’t happen in clean chapters; it overlaps, repeats, and contradicts itself. I wanted the sequencing to capture that. There are no neat resolutions, no perfect fades. The songs shift like memories — sometimes abrupt, sometimes seamless — but always connected by that same pulse of human fragility. When people listen to Disorder from beginning to end, I want them to experience the inner world of Marx Major, not as a visitor, but as a witness.

Looking ahead to release day, what do you hope listeners walk away with after hearing Disorder from start to finish? Is there a specific emotion or realisation you’re hoping to provoke?

I hope people walk away with a sense of recognition. Not comfort, but truth. Disorder isn’t meant to be an easy listen. It’s meant to hold a mirror to what we often refuse to see — the way pain lingers in silence, the way systems built to help us can also break us. I want listeners to understand that mental illness isn’t an abstract concept or a slogan; it’s lived, it’s embodied, and it’s shaped by the world around us.
More than anything, I hope it makes people feel less alone. There’s a strange beauty in being seen for who you really are, even when that truth is hard to hold. Disorder is my way of saying, “This is what it looks like when a person unravels, and this is what it sounds like when they start piecing themselves back together, even if the pieces don’t fit the way you thought they would.” If someone can find a piece of their own story in that — a glimmer of recognition, or the courage to speak their own truth — then the album has done what it was meant to do.