Marx Major

‘Disorder’ is raw, unfiltered, and deeply tied to your lived experiences. What personal truths were the hardest to confront during the writing of this record?

The hardest truth was admitting that some parts of me were shaped by pain. Not just scarred by it, but built from it. There’s a certain cruelty in realising how much of who you are comes from the things that broke you. Writing Disorder forced me to look at the pieces I’d buried: the anger, the guilt, the shame, and the moments I felt complicit in my own silence.
But I think the most painful truth was realising how easily the world forgets those who fall apart. When you’re at your lowest, people treat you like a cautionary tale instead of a person. Making this album meant turning that erasure into evidence. Every verse is a testimony, not just of suffering, but of existence. It was me saying, “I was here, I felt this, and it mattered.”
But I can also say that I was so fortunate, because Disorder found a way to exist thanks to an incredible team. I had people beside me who helped turn my memories into something tangible. Harri Harding helped me give sound to silence, and Vuli carried the visual heartbeat of the project, making sure the story was seen as much as it was heard. Their understanding made it possible for me to be honest. I also want to say a huge thank you to Grimrose, Cleo, Pip, and Jack Prest for their remarkable contributions to the album.

The album dissects the mental health system’s failings with surgical precision. From your own perspective, where do you see the biggest cracks in that system — and how does Disorder give those failures a voice?
The biggest cracks are in the spaces where humanity should be. The mental health system feels like it was designed to manage people, not to understand them. It’s always going to be a revolving door; mental health disorders are for life, and that feels incredibly heavy. You can feel that in every waiting room, every checklist, every conversation where someone writes your pain down like data. There’s a hierarchy of voices in mental health care — professionals speak, patients comply. What Disorder tries to do is give sound to the silence beneath that. I want people to know that beauty and compassion are born from the cracks… We are kintsugi.
Each song became a translation of that imbalance — the sound of what’s unheard. The distortion, the repetition, the claustrophobic production — they all mirror the experience of being reduced to a diagnosis. Disorder doesn’t offer solutions; it exposes the architecture of neglect. I wanted to make an album that doesn’t just describe the system’s failures but makes you feel the weight of living inside them.

In “Annie,” you explore how childhood trauma shapes identity. How has revisiting those early memories through music affected your own healing process?
Revisiting childhood is like walking through a house that’s still burning. You go back looking for proof that you survived it, but every room holds something you’d forgotten to feel. Writing “Annie” was confronting, not just because of what it says about my own story, but because it forced me to understand how deeply those early wounds write themselves into the body.
But there’s something sacred in facing it, too. The act of naming pain is a form of reclaiming it. For me, “Annie” wasn’t about reliving trauma; it was about learning to speak to it without fear. I don’t know if healing is ever complete; it’s more like learning to live alongside the ghosts instead of letting them speak for you. Music gave me that language.

There’s a lot of anger running through tracks like “I Hate You,” but also an undercurrent of empathy and longing. Do you see rage as a necessary step toward catharsis and understanding?
Rage is the body remembering what the mind tried to bury. For a long time I thought anger was proof that I’d failed to heal, but now I see it as the fire that clears the ground. “I Hate You” came from that space — the moment when fury finally finds language. It isn’t about destruction for its own sake; it’s about refusing silence. There’s tenderness inside it too, because anger is love that’s run out of safe places to live. When I let it speak through the music, it stopped consuming me and started to transform.
Catharsis isn’t release; it’s recognition. You look at the flame and realise it’s been trying to guide you out of the dark. “I Hate You” can mean something different for everyone. I know why I wrote it, but that doesn’t mean it only tells my story. People are constantly disappointed, hurt, devastated by someone or something in their life that has held great importance. Once this pain takes hold, you question everything. You come to realise that nothing will ever be the same again.

In today’s culture, “mental health awareness” is often packaged as a slogan. How does Disorder challenge that kind of surface-level activism and push for something more authentic?
Awareness has become a product. We post it, hashtag it, and move on. But awareness without intimacy doesn’t change anything. Disorder tries to slow that down. It asks the listener to sit in the discomfort instead of scrolling past it. I wanted to strip away the polish and show what mental illness actually sounds like when you’re living through it: the repetition, the shame, the absurd moments of beauty that appear in the chaos.
Authenticity, for me, isn’t about performance; it’s about proximity. It’s being willing to stand close enough to pain that it alters you. The record refuses the easy redemption arc. It says: awareness means nothing if we’re not willing to confront the systems that keep people suffering while pretending to care.

You’ve said that “the listener becomes a witness.” What responsibility do you think artists — and audiences — have in confronting these uncomfortable truths, rather than just consuming them?
Witnessing is an act of participation. Once you’ve seen something, you can’t claim innocence anymore. As an artist, my responsibility is to tell the truth as I know it, even when it implicates me. The listener’s responsibility is to stay with that truth long enough for it to change them. Art isn’t meant to tidy pain up; it’s meant to expose the machinery behind it.
When someone listens to Disorder, they step inside a world built from real consequences. The question becomes: what will you do with what you’ve seen? I don’t need agreement or applause; I just want awareness to turn into empathy, and empathy into action. That’s where witnessing ends and accountability begins.