Angel Marcloid (Fire-Toolz). Photo by Bethany Puterbaugh.
Angel Marcloid has built a studio in her own image. When she joins our video call from her home in the Chicago suburbs, days after the release of her 10th-odd album, Breeze, her neon-red hair matches her neon-red desk chair; her rainbow chain necklace matches the seemingly countless rainbow objects decorating the room alongside flashing technicolor lights; and the feline furniture flanking the wall to her right alludes to the inspiration for her multiple visible cat tattoos.
Breeze’s album art mirrors Marcloid’s personal aesthetic as well, filled with images her fans are already familiar with from previous record covers — the rainbow and the cute critters, of course — in this case, bunnies, not cats — but also the fire hydrant, the red soccer ball, and, in black-metal font, two hyphenated words: Fire-Toolz.
As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid has been releasing some of the most chaotic, genre-clashing collages of our time for nearly a decade now, dropping at least one full-length LP every year since 2017 — not to mention singles, splits, EPs, and remix records. Her songs are stylistic supernovas, where ambient explodes into prog metal, gentle acoustic guitars vanish into noisegrind synths, and Auto-Tuned crooning is steamrolled by screamo vocals seemingly engineered to turn the sweetest reverie into a nightmare.
For Marcloid, though, these jarring pivots are simply the way her process logically unfolds. “It’s normal to me,” she says, in one way or another, several times during our interview. Her music, her artwork, her track and album titles — even the bios and press releases generally written for her by others — are all reflections of her earthly experience, and life doesn’t always move in a straight line.
A starving artist in Chicago for most of her career, Marcloid moved to the suburbs a few years ago. More recently, she moved into a much bigger, nicer home with her wife, a therapist, and their five pets (four cats, one dog). Her material circumstances and feelings of safety might be somewhat reflected in Breeze’s lyrics, she concedes, but the album’s sound is about as off the rails as any of her other projects. There are passages here that the untrained but open-minded listener would find beautiful, to be sure, but they’re matched by pulverizing blasts of sound, death rattles echoing up from a bottomless chasm. And Marcloid sees all parts of her sound as reflective of her newfound inner peace.
Every moment on Breeze is, in one way or another, ecstatic, Marcloid insists, and I’m inclined to agree. But it’s hard to listen to Breeze and maintain a sense of calm. Tapping into the tranquility Marcloid feels when she hears these songs requires a leap of faith, a headfirst dive into her kitchen-sink universe.
The FADER: You’ve said you write and record your music in raw bursts of energy, throwing everything at the wall and tweaking it afterwards. What’s your state of mind at that early stage versus when you get down to editing?
Any disciplined producer would say not to mix and match those tasks. But when I’m working on my own music, I’m composing and trying different things and mixing and even doing like half the mastering all at the same time; that’s how the worlds come together. When people make these incredible songs but nothing is mixed, I can’t deal with that. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a song unmixed. People will tell you to commit and move on or else you’ll never get it done, but that sounds horrible. Why would I ever want to commit to anything?
There are so many musical meta references planted across your records. Do you see these as Easter eggs for hardcore fans, or is there a deeper connection between them?
They’re not really for anybody else, but it’s cool when someone picks up on them because it means they’re interested in what I’m doing beyond the gratification of listening to it just once in a while for the thrill.
It comes from growing up on prog metal. One thing I love about some of the older Dream Theater albums is the repetition of melodies across songs. I like doing that across albums, too, because I’m always building the Fire-Toolz universe. So if I make a song in 2024 that uses the same melody or sample or idea as something I did in 2016, that’s completely normal to me. In a movie, stuff happens in the last scene that has to do with the second scene. Fire-Toolz is a documentation of my journey as a being, so why wouldn’t there be tons of references and connections that stretch out over time?
There are lots of recurring themes in your album artwork, too. Tell me about your obsession with rainbows, for instance.
Rainbows are the most grandiose, saccharine, unapologetic display of happiness you can think of; they’re so universal. A lot of the objects in my album art do have more specific meanings, but rainbows have always been just a decoration, a vibe I want to put out there — that feeling I get when I see one, whether it’s illustrated or real.
Cats are another image you come back to over and over.
I’ve had cats my entire life. It was never a lot of cats — only one at a time, maybe two — but I don’t really know anything else. My first encounter with the reality of death when I was only a couple years old was when our first family cat passed. We did a burial ritual and everything. I still miss him.
Liking cats more than people is a cliché, but there’s some truth to it, not because I don’t like people but because cats are my people. I’ve never been lonely when I’ve had pets. I have four cats and a dog, and they’re my best friends. Some of them have special needs, so I’m constantly tending to them, and I love every minute of it. I used to think music was my life, but at some point I thought to myself, “music or cats?” And I realized I would never listen to another song for the rest of my life as long as I could be with cats.
In the past few years, you’ve gone from eking by as a broke artist in Chicago to a kind of upper-middle-class-domestic-suburban bliss. Has your approach to making music changed along with your living situation?
I don’t know if it’s changed anything about my approach. I suppose more financial stability has meant being able to buy plugins instead of cracking them, so that’s less stress and less work. [Moving] has also changed my ability to feel peaceful and feel safe; despite Chicago having an extremely high queer population, we’re not safe at all there.
I’ve been harassed in the gayest parts of Chicago, but being out here — even though this area is more conservative than the city — feels so much safer for me when I’m walking the streets, doing chores. There are some Trump flags in the neighborhood, which should make me feel nervous walking in front of those houses. The people here might have a problem with me, but they’re not gonna do shit about it. In Chicago, you just get shit thrown at you. You get yelled at. You get fucking followed.
When I first moved out of the city, I lived in the most affordable house I could find, and even that was a massive change in the way I felt physically and neurologically from day to day. But if you listen to my music, you’re not necessarily gonna hear that. You might read more positivity and ease in the lyrics, but other than that, the sound is always crazy, whether I’m here or in chaos.
Part of what makes your music so fun is the lightning-fast pivots between these modes. Are these shifts happening in real time, within your process of writing, editing, and mixing all at once?
It’s a continuum to me. A lot of people’s gripes with art are about lack of cohesiveness and the sense that something doesn’t fit in. This might sound oxymoronic, but I don’t see how something standing out makes it not fit in.
People say, “The song doesn’t flow,” or, “It sounds like they just sewed four parts together that don’t have anything to do with each other.” It’s like, “Well, they have something to do with each other now!” They’re in the same song and they’re making a statement, and not all statements have to be beautiful, conventionally flowing lines. If I open a song with a one-and-a-half-minute ambient passage and then go straight into noisegrind, it’s normal to me. That’s how things happen in the world sometimes.
You’ve talked about how you see death metal as an expression of your new state of tranquility. I’ve heard of ecstatic black metal, but never calm death metal. Could you expand on that?
I got interested in death metal when I was 10. I discovered it through late-night MTV, and I remember thinking, “l wanna start a happy death metal band. I wanna sound like this, but I don’t want senseless violence.” Now that I’m older, I know that most of the time it wasn’t senseless; it was political, and the satanic imagery was often in protest of religious fundamentalism.
I’m not saying I was a happy kid — I wasn’t — but I was still very attracted to bringing bright colors and happy vibes to extreme, heavy music. I can see why it would feel like a mismatch to some people, but to me, it’s all ecstatic. The heavier something is, the more likely I’ll cry listening to it. It’s so impactful my body doesn’t even know what to do. That’s why I listen to extremely brutal deathcore so often these days. It’s the same to me as listening to the most beautiful melodic music you can think of — equally as potent, equally as emotional.
My wife feels the same way. We were driving to get breakfast one day, listening to this band Love Lost But Not Forgotten — shrieky, sloppy, noisy, metallic screamo from the early 2000s. We were in the middle of the country, and there was this pond with all these geese. I was like, “This is a little weird,” and she said, “No, it’s perfect. This is how I feel when I see the geese.” I knew in that moment that I’d married the right person, because that’s exactly how I feel. When I see geese swimming in a pond, the heaviest parts of my album seem fitting, but so do the softest parts. They’re just two different ways of expressing that ecstasy.
I love the way this album ends: a recording of your cats and dog, a coffee maker, a running faucet. It’s got a real sense of an ending. I’m wondering if you seek that out in your music, and if endings are easy or hard for you.
I have a problem with ending things. But I started recording my coffee maker and was like, “I wanna make a scene out of this,” so I put my friend Martin’s three dogs — one of which had passed away — together in my kitchen (I got doggy noises from videos he sent me). I wanted my friend Joey to be playing the piano for us while we waited for our coffee, so he re-recorded a track he’d sent me earlier on, and then I was like, “Bring your cat,” so he sent me a couple clips of his cat Coco meowing. Then another friend sent me a video of his dog Hineni playing with some other dogs, and I put that in there, too. Realistically, there are probably nine dogs at the end of the album, even though it doesn’t sound like it. It’s this scene where I’m making coffee, Joey’s playing piano for me and Martin, and our pets are in the kitchen — something that might never happen but feels really good to imagine.