Roil shares new album ‘Living Outside The Closet’
- Kenny Sandberg
- Jun 1
- 2 min read
ROIL’s Living Outside the Closet is less interested in catharsis than documentation. Across eleven tracks, the Belgium-based songwriter maps the emotional residue left behind by shame, desire, masculinity, and queer isolation with an almost uncomfortable level of specificity. The album rarely reaches for dramatic reinvention or polished empowerment narratives; instead, it lingers inside emotional contradictions, allowing awkwardness and vulnerability to coexist without resolution. That restraint becomes one of the project’s defining strengths.
Musically, the record inhabits familiar indie-pop territory — muted synth textures, conversational vocals, understated guitar arrangements — but ROIL’s writing prevents the album from dissolving into algorithmic bedroom-pop melancholy. “Straight Guy” and “Outside the Closet” carry an emotional exhaustion that feels lived rather than stylized, while “manhood” quietly dismantles masculine performance through humour sharp enough to undercut its own sadness. Even when the production occasionally drifts toward predictability, the emotional clarity keeps the songs compelling.
The album’s pacing intentionally avoids momentum. Tracks bleed into one another through soft atmospherics and low-energy introspection, creating a listening experience that can feel emotionally claustrophobic at times. But that emotional density mirrors the album’s thematic concerns: loneliness, internalized shame, and the exhausting labor of self-definition. ROIL rarely offers relief, and when moments of optimism emerge — particularly on “I don’t mind” or “dandelion” — they arrive cautiously, almost suspiciously.
What ultimately separates Living Outside the Closet from many confession-driven indie-pop records is its refusal to simplify queer experience into trauma or triumph. ROIL understands identity as something unstable and emotionally messy, shaped as much by humour, resentment, insecurity, and longing as by liberation. The result is an album that feels less like a polished statement and more like an emotional archive: imperfect, intimate, and difficult to ignore.
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