Silk is the sound of one person pushing themselves to the edge of their own emotional landscape. The Belfast‑based shoegaze project, helmed entirely by Michael Smyth, turns solitude into a creative engine: writing, performing, and recording every element of Auralux alone before bringing friends onstage to bring the songs to life. The result is a record that feels deeply internal yet unexpectedly expansive, shaped by memory, loss, cinematic influence, and the strange clarity that comes from doing everything yourself. We sat down with Smyth to talk about the making of Auralux, the moment Silk found its voice, and how the project’s emotional and visual identity came into focus.
Photo Credits: @annalogue.jpeg
Smyth resists calling Silk a “solo project,” but the truth is unavoidable: he wrote every note, played every instrument, recorded every track, and designed the artwork before handing it off to mixers and mastering engineers. The result is a body of work that feels startlingly intimate.
When we spoke to him, Smyth was disarmingly honest about the emotional stakes of doing everything alone: “The record lives or dies, succeeds or fails solely on the decisions I made, the songs I wrote, my voice, what I sang and the art I designed. That is equal parts exciting and terrifying. I think there’s an inherent emotional weight to the project because of this which is then amplified because it’s essentially my vision of what this all should be, which is an extension of myself.”
Smyth didn’t fully grasp the emotional gravity of working alone until the album was finished and he had to send it out into the world. Suddenly, the solitude of the creative process became a spotlight. “It wasn’t until I reached the stage of having to reach out to people about putting the record out that it started to sink in,” he reflects. There’s a line he quotes from Refused – “not even failure” – that became a kind of mantra. The idea that trying, even unsuccessfully, is a form of victory. That fear shouldn’t be allowed to dictate the shape of a life. That philosophy threads through the entire record.
“I hit on the chords for the chorus for July and that felt right.”
Before July, Silk existed in fragments: experiments, sketches, songs recorded “by accident” while Smyth was learning to mix. But July was the moment the project crystallised. He wrote it on a Thursday and by Monday, it was recorded, mixed and mastered. He recalls: “Having the ability to record and play everything means I can work almost at the speed of inspiration.” And that speed matters. Once July existed, the rest of the album began to orbit around it.
Photo Credits: @annalogue.jpeg
“By the end I felt like someone had ripped my heart out.”
Smyth talks about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the way people talk about breakups that changed them. When he brought Clementine to band practice, he improvised the opening line “I met you on the shore” and instantly recognised the film’s fingerprints. “I’m a little older now so loss and memory weigh on me a little heavier now, and I think that love born of opposing personalities, desire to be understood and loneliness is emotionally very heavy,” he says.
Smyth didn’t set out to write a record about the duality of heaviness and hope, collapse and catharsis, but the themes emerged anyway. “Once it’s all finished then you have time and distance to sit back, listen and analyse. At that point those things which were obviously subconsciously present during the process start to present themselves in a much more overt way. There are definite red thread themes that run throughout the record, and they do seem to offer or explore heaviness and hope. I think that a lot of the record is about duality and symbiosis, feeling extremes and recognising they can co-exist together.”
The EP's title track contains one of its most striking lines. "Keep me out of heaven / It's just another place." It's part rejection of organised religion, part commentary on ambition's endless treadmill. "It's about me trying to accept that and maybe at the same time appreciate a little more the things I've be fortunate enough to do and opportunities I've had."
"It's taken me a long time to realise but really being friends with people you're in a band with is so important and not just having them because they can play. At this stage, that's very important to me."
Studio Silk is a rather solitary creature: Smyth records everything by himself, drums first generally. "I spend hours wading through an almost crippling self-doubt with vocals until I get something that I don't hate. It's a lot of fun. Vocals take the longest and are the most difficult." Live, Silk is something else entirely. His live band is made up of close friends from other projects (Broncos, Virgins), and that camaraderie transforms the songs. On stage, the songs shed their studio precision and become something rawer and more physical. And it forces them to evolve, some not making the cut. "There have been a few tracks I've just abandoned because they just dont work live and I want to play all the material. When you get them in front of a crowd and you can see and feel people's reaction then that pushes the songs into different places, and you start to emotionally react differently," Smyth reflects.
"I don't want to make Auralux II, I've made that record, it's done."
Auralux is barely out, but Smyth is already deep into the next record. Five demos are already contenders. "Everytime I finish a larger body of work, consciously or not, I'm assessing what worked, what didn't, what have I achieved with this, where can I push or what can I explore that's new." The new material is more dynamic, more melodic and less reliant on walls of fuzz. There’s even a tambourine. "That's a big deal for tambourine fans," Smyth jokes.
AURALUX OUT NOW.
Words by
Marie Müller, 2026.