Clara Kimera builds a modded underworld on electronic cut “eye 2 eye”

Few artists occupy the edges of reality as naturally as French artist and producer Clara Kimera, pulling from the surreal, the spectral, and the uncanny. “eye 2 eye”, her first solo release since last year’s Dial 8 EP, pushes that sensibility further, drifting into the “world between life and death” she often imagines. It’s a palette informed by glitchy electronics that she longed to embrace beyond the electropop sound of Agar Agar. “I felt the urge to show my own vision,” she says. “Something a lot more inspired by shoegaze, witch house, and ambient tones.”

Produced by longtime collaborator 888rks, the track glows with squelchy synths and glossy electronics, sitting somewhere between OPN-style dream logic and underworld pop. Lyrically, it leans towards the metaphysical with a fantasy-realm meditation on endings, delivered by Kimera’s voice like fragments overheard through a wall echoing the horror-tinged murmur of Alice Glass.

Kimera draws on a constellation of influences, including Hans Bellmer’s uncanny doll photography. She’s also deeply shaped by manga and anime, particularly Soul Eater, Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!, and the dreamlike spirituality of Mamoru Oshii’s film Angel’s Egg, where emotion takes physical form. “I love how Atsushi Okubo illustrates emotional spaces [in Soul Eater] like fear, anxiety, pain in vivid landscapes,” she says.

“There’s invisible places in our heads that can make us evil: a long infinite hallway of stairs, two people slowly dancing to a weird jazz tune.” She likens the song’s themes to Twin Peaks’ extradimensional realm The Black Lodge, “it’s like the thin world between life and death…[in the Lodge] there is a person talking to you backwards and you’re just casually sitting on a chair. I like the fact that we can make images out of these spiritual projections.”

The song inhabits a liminal plane, while its video – directed entirely inside The Sims by Kimera – builds a world to match. Kimera has been modding the game since childhood, once running a Sims blog that recreated MTV shows like Room Raiders and Pimp My Ride. “The visual possibilities are endless, I’ve always felt like the director of my own film.” As she grew older, her builds became more elaborate; discovering the global modding community unlocked a new realm of collaboration. “It’s one of my favourite things about the internet. Meeting people that truly get your POV and artistic references,” she explains.

Kimera’s own universe continued to expand to the electronic community. Recently featured on Canadian trance auteur TDJ’s debut album, with single “On and On (You Lie)”, it placed her alongside genre heavyweights like Hannah Diamond, Danny L Harle, and 8485 – a significant arrival into the orbit of hyperpop and dance music.

For “eye 2 eye”, she stages scenes of horror, sorrow, and longing inside the simulation. The video oscillates between eerie and playful with uncanny digital choreography mirroring the track’s tension. Still, the single feels like a distillation of her own evolving identity that is darkly whimsical yet entirely her own. “I never really know where I’m headed,” she admits. “But this feels like the natural evolution of finding more and more of myself and what I want to share.”