Destined by Their Own Design is Nilah Nazarene's most vulnerable project to date. It is an album born from sickness, rage, isolation, and grief that isn't about death, but about absence. Her experience with mono left her bedridden for months; long enough for her life to fall apart in ways she couldn't stop or even fully understand as it happened. Jobs, relationships, friendships, and self-worth all frayed and unraveled at the seams. "The silence that filled their spaces created more noise in my head than ever before," she writes. This record is that noise materialized, flipping from brutal and furious to honest and exhausted, occasionally reaching upward for gentler expressions of sorrow.
Listen to the album here, and read Nilah's rundown of it all below.

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This album is about my feelings of frustration, anger, isolation, desperation, and depression I had while being sick with mono for about three months. Even after getting better, I was still stuck in the negative mindset I had while afflicted, as the lasting effects were still impacting me. I'd lost my job, my girlfriend, most of my friend group, and my self-esteem. (Not lost as in died, lost as in they just left me.)

The silence that filled their spaces created more noise in my head than ever before. I was not happy. I was not understanding or accepting. I couldn't grasp why this all happened.

Arnolone Syndrome was the first thing I'd recorded. It mostly reflects how I felt wasting away in bed most of the time. I felt so weak that I couldn't really do anything, so I tried to reflect the state between consciousness and submission to the fever that I was in. The title is a Chainsaw Man reference.

Endless Cold is based off of a recurring nightmare that I've been having since I was a child. An endless frozen plain with no landmarks, howling winds, chiding hail, and harsh cold that subsumes everything in its wake. I had this one a lot while sick. It'd contrast the heat that the fever would give me while awake, so it wasn't all bad, I guess.

Everyone Will Feel It represents the anger I had most well. It's a noise rock outburst that bleeds together in a way that could probably be unending, but it's best not to stay angry all the time. You'll become nothing more than the bile that you may or may not deserve to spew, devout on settling scores and keeping grudges that only you know about. There's no point. I wanted to get revenge on everyone who'd left me behind, hence the title, but what does "revenge" even really entail in the adult world?

I Miss You is reflective of that anger too, but is obviously far more quiet and inspired more by confusion and sadness. It's a buildup with multiple "orchestral" pieces, that eventually flatten out back to the base noise. No matter how much wailing or ruminating or writhing on the floor or asking "why?" you do, things have happened. You're going to have to deal with that and the aftermath too, as a treat.

The Seer tracks are as quiet as I really get, being echoes of each other. They're kind of a nostalgic sound to me, ambient sketches that take me back to a place that I've never really been. Seersha is wider, a more vivid memory, but still shows the fraudulence of said memory with distorted pitch changes that attempt to imitate melody. Sha the Seer is like coming back to that memory later on in life, where you can remember less of it, and the distortions are too in your face to ignore. You have to take off the rose-tinted glasses at some point.

The title Destined by Their Own Design represents the feeling of fate being unavoidable. At one point, my rage had come to envelop my entire day-to-day life that I just had to find a better way to cope. It's dumb, but I would just say that things were always going to be this way. I decided that the relationship I was in to bound to end at one point, and that friends come and go, no matter how long you've known each other.

This is true to an extent, but you also can't quite blame unfortunate events on destiny. People have wants, needs, wills, what have you. Things will happen. Rifts will open as a result of that, and they will often open between people to tear them apart. I can wish all I want that these things didn't happen, but they did, and I have to deal with it. But at the same time, I can't deal with it by avoiding any self-reflection and pinning it all on the universe. I've come to terms with everything, but I still needed to let out the rage once and for all. Now this album exists. - N.N.