“The world just kept spinning. We hit the ground again—I thought I had died. Everything went black for a second. And then, suddenly, the van stopped. The g-forces vanished, but inside me, the spinning didn’t. My body was still. But inside, I kept tumbling.”
That’s Laura Hickli, describing the car accident that changed her life and nearly shattered her relationship with music. Stranger To Myself, Hickli’s full-length debut moves through her journey from fracture to revival.
“What’s the point of being alive when it can all be taken away so quickly?”
Hickli’s unfiltered recollections are shaped by fear, shock, and survivor’s guilt. They appear in Stranger To Myself’s darkest passages, grounding the album in raw, unguarded vulnerability.
During a 2023 U.S. tour, Hickli’s van skidded on ice and flew off the road, spun 180 degrees into oncoming traffic, careening backwards off the highway and rolling three times down a 50 foot hill. As it tumbled down the hillside, Hickli felt everything slow down, watching her belongings rise around her, suspended in eerie stillness, time stretching the space between life and death. It was just twenty-four seconds, and although there were no severe injuries, Hickli was painfully affected. In the months that followed, writing music unpacked what her body had survived yet her mind could not accept.
Stranger To Myself is a sonic journey towards healing. Music holds immense power for Hickli; it’s how she processes, how she connects, how she survives. Across the album, she confronts grief, fear, and dissociation on her path to acceptance and growth. Two emotional currents run throughout: songs rooted in loss and anguish, and others cautiously imagining a future beyond survival. These contrasting tones live side by side creating an unsettled emotional world that reflects trauma and recovery. Through this darkness and despair, light emerges.
Stranger To Myself is an emotionally turbulent experience; a meditative reflection in limbo, only to culminate in a climax of sound. Harsh, raw instrumentation reverberates throughout, intensity dispelling the tranquility of seconds prior. The songs that emerged aren’t pretty, polished reflections, they’re unsettling and painfully human. Recovery has no clear finish, but creation has given her connection, and now Hickli feels less alone.
