A Review of Lysandra Vale’s Solo Album

By Elian Morrow, Senior Music Correspondent, The Maraheim Courier

Lysandra Vale

There are albums about survival.

There are albums about anger.

There are albums about triumph.

Lysandra Vale’s solo record is about something rarer: what happens after you leave and the noise finally stops.

This is not a revenge album. It is not a confessional diary set to melody. It is a document of continuance—of a woman learning how to remain intact when the structure that once defined her collapses.

What makes this album extraordinary is its restraint. Vale never dramatizes her pain for spectacle. Instead, she allows the listener to sit in the quiet aftermath: the shame, the doubt, the fragments of identity left scattered when a life built around control dissolves.

This record understands something most albums about abuse and recovery miss:freedom is not loud at first.

It trembles. It hesitates. It asks permission it no longer needs.

Across fourteen tracks, Vale traces a psychological arc that feels uncomfortably real—one that moves not in straight lines, but in cycles: inward collapse, externalization, confrontation, intimacy, and finally integration. The album never promises healing as a finish line. It offers something braver: presence.

By the time the record ends, there is no grand victory pose. There is simply a woman standing where she chose to stand—without apology.

Track-By-Track Emotional Map

1. Chained to the Storm

The album opens in sustained entrapment. Rooted firmly in symphonic metal, the song surges with relentless momentum, mirroring the exhausting reality of living inside prolonged control. The structure loops emotionally as much as musically—movement without escape. This is trauma as endurance: the body still moving long after the self has gone quiet.

2. Castle of Cards

A shift in texture and intimacy. Though the drums remain heavy, Castle of Cards unfolds as a cinematic ballad, carried by intimate verses and expansive choruses layered with subtle choir and background vocals. Knowing this is a cover of Miranda Shale’s memorial song for the victims of Maraheim University reframes its role here: Lysandra does not overwrite its meaning, she internalizes it. What was once collective grief becomes personal reckoning. The fragility the song was written to mourn now reflects the instability of her own world, giving the piece a second, deeply private life.

3. I’ll Have to Let You Go

This track marks the point where hesitation collapses into motion. Less of a ballad and more of a flowing, forward-driven piece, the melody rarely rests, mirroring the urgency of leaving before resolve dissolves. Ethereal background vocals weave tightly with the lead, creating a sense of momentum that never quite settles. Psychologically, this is departure without relief—escape driven by necessity rather than certainty.

4. Still Awake

One of the album’s emotional fault lines. The song’s anthemic, instantly memorable chorus contrasts sharply with verses steeped in hypervigilance and sleeplessness. This juxtaposition is key: trauma here is not quiet, it’s repetitive and intrusive. The catchiness isn’t accidental—it mirrors how memory and fear loop relentlessly once safety is no longer theoretical.

5. Liminal

An ethereal, restrained ballad that captures the disorientation following departure. Identity feels suspended; shame and doubt press inward. The arrangement is soft, spacious, and exposed, allowing the internalized voice of control to surface without confrontation. This is the psychological threshold where the danger is gone, but the self has not yet returned.

6. I Remain

Often poised to be misunderstood as a redemption anthem, I Remain is far more cautious. Its hook-driven, anthemic chorus provides grounding rather than triumph. This song represents stabilization—the moment where survival stops being reactive and becomes sustained. It does not declare victory; it confirms presence. That distinction is crucial.

7. I’ve Yet To Be

Identity diffusion takes center stage. The song articulates the uneasy realization that when control ends, certainty dissolves with it. Musically lighter and emotionally suspended, it reflects dissociation not as emptiness, but as cautious distance. Healing here is not forward motion—it is waiting without collapse.

8. Vincent

Originally conceived as an Ethereal Emotions track but never completed before Vale left the band, Vincent carries a productive tension between past and present. Its external narrative and mythic framing reflect its origins, creating a slight emotional distance that now reads as intentional rather than unresolved. In the context of this solo album, that distance becomes meaningful: the song functions as a transitional artifact, bridging who she was with who she is becoming.

Psychologically, Vincent represents displaced processing—anger and consequence explored safely through story when direct confrontation is not yet possible. The song’s ability to hold both its former identity and its newly claimed voice mirrors Lysandra’s own state at this point in the album: carrying pieces of a past life forward, not to preserve them, but to transform them.

9. Crimson Wonderland (Life Goes On)

Covering Neduz’s song, Lysandra reshapes it through her own emotional lens. Where the original contemplates global grief and moral dissonance, her performance reframes it as survivor’s awareness: the painful coexistence of healing and ongoing suffering elsewhere. Her delivery grounds the song within the album’s arc, transforming it into a meditation on guilt, empathy, and the uneasy permission to keep living.

10. You Don’t Get to Tell This Story

This is the album’s most unfiltered moment. Vocally, Lysandra pushes further here than anywhere else—belting, rasping, and ultimately screaming the final chorus with a rawness that strips away polish. The grit in her voice is not stylized; it is exposed. This is the moment where authorship is reclaimed not intellectually, but viscerally. The emotional cost is audible.

11. Shattered Chains

Returning to symphonic metal force, this track embodies kinetic release. The aggression here is purposeful, not destructive. Chains break not through rage alone, but through sustained momentum. This is empowerment expressed as movement—strength rediscovered in the body.

12. Look At Me Now

Theatrical and unapologetically uplifting, the choruses draw clear inspiration from musical theatre traditions, where empowerment is sung outward and unguarded. Even without the verses, the repeated cry of “Look at me now!” carries immediate emotional clarity. The extended line—“I’m not surviving anymore”—soars into affirmation, signaling a shift from endurance to ownership.

13. Where I Land

One of the album’s most emotionally satisfying pieces. The verses retain vulnerability, but the choruses open into ethereal warmth, radiating safety and resolution. Musically, this track provides the album’s sense of arrival—forward motion finally rewarded with stability. It is victory not as conquest, but as peace.

14. Come Closer

The album closes with intimacy rather than spectacle. Styled as a classic romantic ballad, the song is relaxed, alluring, and quietly confident. Lysandra’s voice is warm, unguarded, and sensual, offering a deliberate contrast to the album’s earlier melancholy. Desire returns without fear; connection exists without control. As an epilogue, it is both narratively and emotionally complete.

Final Assessment of Lysandra Vale's Debut Album

Lysandra Vale’s solo debut is a rare example of an album that understands both its subject matter and its medium. It approaches trauma, grief, and recovery without sensationalism, allowing the music to carry as much narrative weight as the lyrics themselves. The sequencing is deliberate, the genre shifts purposeful, and the emotional pacing reflects lived experience rather than narrative convenience.

Musically, the album balances symphonic metal force with ethereal balladry and anthemic accessibility, giving each emotional phase its own sonic language. Vale’s vocal performance is consistently compelling, but it is at its most powerful when she allows imperfection—grit, strain, breath—to remain audible. These moments do not weaken the record; they define it.

Not all listeners will find Vale’s restraint satisfying. Some may argue that the album’s refusal to dramatize its conflict results in moments that feel understated to the point of emotional distance, particularly in its midsection. Others may find the oscillation between deeply personal confession and external narrative jarring, wishing for a more traditional arc of escalation and release.

Yet even this criticism acknowledges the album’s intent: Vale does not offer catharsis on demand. She asks the listener to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and quiet resolution—choices that may divide audiences, but rarely feel accidental.

What ultimately sets this album apart is its refusal to simplify healing into a single arc or message. There is no tidy redemption here, no performative triumph. Instead, the record offers something far more credible: continuity. The sense that a self once fragmented has been gathered, not erased.

This is not just a strong debut.It is a confident statement of artistic identity—measured, intentional, and deeply human.

Rating: ★★★★½ / 5