Between Storm and Self-Reflection: ‘Oxis 8’ Captures the Aftermath of Heartbreak
Oxis. Photo by Jay Bradley.
The wind is heavy, the skies are grey and landscapes stretch wide in layers of green. There’s a quiet kind of hope in it, the kind that comes just before wildflowers bloom. If an album can embody that moment between storm and rebirth, Oxis’s eighth project, simply titled Oxis 8, would be it.
The indie-electronic, Los Angeles-based artist Oxis — also known as Valentina Cy — released her eighth album on Jan. 16, expanding her catalog that has grown steadily since her 2024 debut. Aquatic imagery runs throughout her discography, with each track named after a species of fish, reinforcing a carefully constructed ecosystem.
Committing to aquatic life, Oxis has grounded her sound as organic, fluid and alive with her electropop albums, filled with strings and layers of soft, yearning vocals that drift and swell like tides.
The opening track, “Dogfish,” eases in with a subtle bite. It carries that 2016–2017 lo-fi bedroom pop sensibility — fingerpicked guitar, a steady metronome pulse and hushed delivery. The softness isn’t gentle. It's numb. She sings about someone who acts as if what they shared wasn’t real, diminishing something that once was. It’s the kind of post-breakup track where you have to admit you’re not over them, even if you pretend you are.
But Oxis 8 is less concerned with the breakup itself than with what follows. The album lingers in the psychological aftermath: the identity shift that can occur when love destabilizes a person’s sense of self.
The record feels suspended in the hours after midnight — looping thoughts, reread messages, debates between texting your ex or not. Heartbreak spirals. It lingers. It reshapes you before you even realize something is missing.
To understand that erosion beyond the album, I asked readers to reflect on moments they no longer recognized themselves after love ended. After responding to the prompt on Instagram, user Jocelyn Cortes agreed to speak further about how instability within a past relationship reshaped her sense of self.
Cortes described her former self as “deeply emotional, loyal and willing to fight for love,” someone who tied her worth to being chosen. Over time, she said, the instability within her past relationship made her shrink parts of herself to avoid conflict, adjusting her behavior to make her partner feel secure.
“I lost my emotional ease,” Cortes said. “I started to become more hyper aware, hyper vigilant and just constantly analyzing everything.”
The closing track, “Fluke,” mirrors Cortes’s self-reflection of allowing another person to change her. As Oxis vulnerably admits, “the way you had me tucked away inside your palm / and the way you had me strung out all along,” in the track, it forces listeners to feel the burning guilt from unknowingly allowing manipulation to seep into a relationship.
The relief felt from being released from someone's control may be a bittersweet feeling, as the road to independence can be uneven, particularly when self-worth had been intertwined with another person’s approval.
“I questioned my patterns, my standards and the parts that were shaped by the instability,” Cortes said. “Grounding didn’t happen overnight. It came from sitting with discomfort and confronting parts of myself I hadn’t fully developed.”
That discomfort pulses through tracks like “Guili,” where repetitive static and hi-hats create a trance-like tension. Cy sings about forgetting how to do things as simple as breathing — an image that captures the disorientation of trying to piece yourself back together after being pulled apart.
In moments of emotional instability, music can mirror what we struggle to articulate. Albums like Oxis’ create a vulnerable space for listeners to feel recognized in their uncertainty and transform private unrest into something communal. Emotions become shared through sound. Rather than promising healing, Oxis documents the unease itself, making it feel less solitary.
