HAYLA Releases 'DARK,' a Raw Sophomore Album Born from Crisis

From Festival Stages to Solitary Confession

HAYLA built her name on euphoric EDM choruses written to be shouted in unison. Her new album, DARK, asks a question most singer-songwriters dare not confront: what happens to a voice built for festival crowds once it's finally alone in a room?

When the Grammy-nominated vocal powerhouse released "Where You Are" with John Summit over three years ago, she instantaneously became a household name in the global dance music community. Her debut album DUSK followed in late 2024, further entrenching her as a coveted, fan-favorite festival performer. On her sophomore album, HAYLA walks off those massive stages, lets her eyes adjust from the lasers, and starts telling the truth.

"I wrote this album in the darkest period of my life," she said. "A time when I wasn't sure if I knew how to vocalize my feelings and what I had been through."

Vulnerability as the New Bravery

The shift recalls the leap Robyn made from the dancefloor purge of "Dancing On My Own" to the exposed vulnerability of Honey eight years later, or when Lorde traded the fireworks of Melodrama for the sunbaked exhale of Solar Power. Dissociation has its own sound and it's devastating in DARK, which proves that sometimes the bravest thing a voice can do isn't belt louder, but admit it was shaking the whole time.

HAYLA's version of that transformation arrives on "Heal," the album's opener, where a broken radio tuner drifts in and out like a heartbeat that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to keep going. "I want you to heal the parts of me that no one loved," she pleads over haunting keys.

Anxiety, Alchemy, and Erosion

The darkly intoxicating "I Don't Believe It Anymore" delivers a chugging, claustrophobic beat with a grungy guitar riff that gives her anxiety its own body to inhabit. "I burn my teeth when you speak to me" is one particularly evocative lyric, a small feat of alchemy that recalls Fiona Apple's talent for writing illusory lines too specific to be anything but real.

Where the rest of DARK tightens its fists to a white-knuckled clench, "Tear Me Down" opens its hands. Hazy vocal swells and acoustic plucks give the track a warm, unspooling quality, though HAYLA's ache is no less stinging as she comes to the realization that joy is easier to lose than pain. Bliss is corrosive here, the last vestiges of a love slowly eroding in the details like the way the contours of a face disappear before the feelings its eyes once stirred.

From Silence to Voice

If that track mourns something still dissolving, "Not Here" is a eulogy for something already gone. It's the album's rawest and most heartbreaking cut, where HAYLA's quivering voice is so tender you can hear the effort it takes to keep singing at all. "Should I save myself the sorrow / When my mind's been wanting to swallow my words?" she asks into the void.

DARK closes with "I Just Hope We Don't Run Out Of Time," a cinematic masterstroke with a lush and lilting beat blooming with textured synthscapes reminiscent of M83. HAYLA begins in a whisper and ends in a full-throated belt, the vocal arc mirroring the album's larger journey from silence to voice.

DARK is out now on streaming platforms.