Love and devotion drive Guillotine’s newest project, a kind of religious psychosis, a fervor so consuming it could feel life-altering. Can you recall moments of spiritual surrender or intense emotion that mirror falling in love, losing yourself in someone, or giving yourself wholly to a feeling?

Definitely. In the past, I’ve been in relationships where I felt myself slipping in and out of my own mind a bit, ignoring red flags, rationalizing behavior, convincing myself I could “fix” whatever was broken. I’m naturally a fixer, so my initial thoughts are always to ask, “What went wrong? How can I make this better?” That kind of thinking can become all-consuming. It narrows your world until the relationship is the only thing you can see, almost like a spiritual tunnel vision. Those experiences, though, taught me how powerful devotion can be, how it can become a quiet psychosis when you lose yourself in someone else. It’s the same intensity I channeled into this project: that mix of surrender, yearning, and the eerie holiness that can live inside emotional extremes.

Do you think that those who love wholeheartedly approach it with the same intensity and belief as a follower of a cult or spiritual leader? In this light, do you see someone in love with you as a devoted acolyte, utterly captivated, hopelessly surrendered, and yes, does that change how you inhabit your own role in the dynamic?

Oh, absolutely. I personally don’t see a huge difference between someone who devotes themselves to a god and someone who’s madly in love. In both cases, you’re looking to another being for guidance, comfort, or answers. For a long time, I interpreted anyone showing me love or interest as being devoted to me. In return, it created this illusion that I was on a pedestal, and honestly, I played into that at times. I’ve also put other people on pedestals, expecting them to be more than human. What I’ve learned is that neither direction is healthy. It places enormous pressure and unrealistic expectations on both people. So while the intensity of love can mirror a kind of spiritual devotion, I’m much more conscious now of not letting that dynamic define the relationship or my role within it.

Is this album a direct emotional autobiography, or a constructed persona exploring heartbreak, obsession, love, despair, relief, and acceptance? Where do you go internally to access these emotions, what memories, surroundings, or obsessions do you revisit to fully inhabit the album’s world?

It’s very much a direct emotional autobiography. I’m not a religious person at all, I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness until I was about six or seven, but I’ve never carried any formal faith into my adulthood. Growing up in that environment, though, started paving an ideation of devotion within me that I didn’t recognize until later on. So instead, love often becomes the stand-in for that kind of spiritual intensity in my life, the obsession, the sacrifice, the devotion. All of that found its way into this project. When I was working on the EP, Paul Bennett, my producer and also a close friend, would create sounds that instantly pulled specific emotions out of me. Sometimes it was sadness, sometimes anger. For example, the track “Offerings” comes from that feeling of having given so much of myself that there’s nothing left to offer. The visuals reflect that, too: just my head (which is seen throughout religious imagery) on a medical table with tubes pumping blood in and out. To me, it symbolizes “What more do I have to give?” and those tubes symbolize a relationship that’s clearly falling apart but still hanging on by a few fragile threads. It’s all very sacrificial. Internally, I access these emotions by revisiting those moments where I felt emptied out, consumed, or overwhelmed by love. It’s less about constructing a persona and more about amplifying the ugliest and rawest parts of myself until they become their own world.

Your persona radiates sensuality and confidence, exploring the many faces of falling in love and surrendering to a feeling. Do sex, sensuality, and physical devotion play a role in this album? Across the arc of your EP, from the aching melancholy of the opening tracks to the exhalation and clarity of “Draped Upon the Breath of Judgement”, where do the most primal expressions of love, heartbreak, and ritualized devotion emerge?