In an interview with LoudHER Media, vocalist Gaëtan opens up about mental overload, emotional collapse, the intensity behind SPLEEN’s latest single, and the unsettling visual world of its music video.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. It builds quietly through long days, mounting pressure, unresolved emotions, and the things people convince themselves they can keep carrying. Then, sometimes without warning, everything becomes too much. For SPLEEN, that moment of emotional overload is at the heart of their latest release, “The Extreme Limit of What My Brain Can Handle,” a track that captures the uncomfortable space between holding everything together and finally losing control.
In a conversation with LoudHER Media, vocalist Gaëtan explores the personal experiences that shaped the song, the complicated nature of reaching one’s breaking point, and the challenge of communicating genuine anger through aggressive music. Lasting less than two minutes, the single doesn’t attempt to soften its impact or give the listener much time to recover. Instead, it throws them directly into the chaos, mirroring the overwhelming thoughts and emotions that can accumulate beneath the surface.
For Gaëtan, the breaking point described in the title isn’t necessarily a physical explosion. It’s the moment when everything seems to collapse internally, leaving a person questioning why things are the way they are, repeating the same thoughts, and gradually slipping into numbness. It’s a feeling that can be difficult to articulate, particularly when someone has spent so long pushing through their struggles without acknowledging how much they’ve accumulated.
Although the track draws from personal experiences, Gaëtan recognizes that its emotional foundation extends far beyond his own circumstances. The pressure of work, exhaustion, depression, anger, and abuse can leave people carrying more than they realize. Sometimes, it takes finally being alone for everything that has been suppressed over days, weeks, months, or even years to come rushing out. What begins as a personal experience can become something deeply relatable to anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the weight of their own life.
One of the most compelling ideas discussed throughout the interview is that everyone has a different threshold for what they can handle. Gaëtan compares emotional overload to a gauge that gradually fills whenever something goes wrong. Some people recognize when their capacity is running low and find ways to release the pressure, while others may not realize how much they have accumulated until they are already close to breaking. It’s a striking way of understanding burnout, not simply as a consequence of work, but as the result of everything life can demand from a person.
That emotional intensity carries directly into the structure of the single. Rather than stretching the idea across a longer composition, SPLEEN deliberately keeps the track short, aggressive, and immediate. Gaëtan explains that the band wanted the listener to experience the same intensity they felt within the music. The goal was to create something violent and brief, something that could push the listener toward a state of freaking out while still allowing them to connect with the emotions behind it. The song doesn’t need an extended buildup to communicate its message; its brevity becomes part of the experience.
But aggression alone doesn’t necessarily make music emotionally honest. When discussing the difference between sounding angry and genuinely communicating anger, Gaëtan acknowledges how difficult that distinction can be, particularly within metal and its many subgenres, where screamed vocals can sometimes obscure the lyrical meaning. While he appreciates the intensity and texture of deathcore vocals, he also values moments when particular words or sentences become clear enough to communicate what a song is trying to express. For him, emotional authenticity can sometimes be recognized through something less tangible than lyrics alone: a feeling, a distinct identity, or a signature that makes a song resonate beyond its sound.
The accompanying music video expands on that emotional world through stop-motion lettering and animations that give the lyrics a more immediate visual presence. Working alongside Guyguy and Neyssan, the band sought to translate the song’s internal chaos into something viewers could experience for themselves. Gaëtan explains that the intention was both literal and psychological: to represent what happens inside the mind when it becomes overloaded while also leaving viewers questioning what they have just witnessed.
That sense of disorientation is deliberate. The visuals are meant to mirror the loss of words that can accompany reaching one’s emotional limit, when thoughts become difficult to organize and even understanding what is happening internally feels impossible. The video doesn’t simply illustrate the lyrics; it attempts to recreate the confusion behind them.
One particularly unsettling detail came from an unexpected personal association. While filming the stop-motion scratching sequences, Gaëtan remembered a disturbing nightmare in which he found himself in the middle of a ghost town, driving nails into his own head. That memory eventually found its way into the video’s imagery, giving one of its more striking visual details a connection to his own subconscious.
Yet beneath the madness and destructive imagery, SPLEEN’s broader message is rooted in something deeply human. Gaëtan explains that the band wants people to understand that everyone experiences emotions, from joy and happiness to profound sadness and destructive feelings. Those experiences do not make someone less human, and struggling with them does not mean they are alone. Even when this particular song explores the feeling of losing control, its underlying message offers a reminder that difficult emotions are part of being alive.
Through “The Extreme Limit of What My Brain Can Handle,” SPLEEN confronts the uncomfortable reality of what happens when the pressure becomes too much to contain. The track’s brevity, uncompromising aggression, and disorienting visuals work together to create an experience that feels less like observing someone else’s breaking point and more like being pulled into it.
In our conversation with Gaëtan, we explore the personal experiences behind the release, why emotional limits can be difficult to recognize, how SPLEEN approaches honesty within aggressive music, and the disturbing memories that helped shape the music video’s visual identity.
“The Extreme Limit of What My Brain Can Handle” is a title that sounds like a breaking point. What does reaching that limit look like for you personally shutting down, exploding, dissociating, becoming numb, or something else entirely?
“Yes, it’s definitely a breaking point. To me, its an exploding point, but not physically, its more of a state where everything collapse, like asking yourself why is it like this, repeat the same words, etc.. it has kind of a becoming numb thing yeah.”
Is this release documenting a mental state you were already experiencing, or did making the music actually push you into confronting things you had been avoiding?
“Yeah, it has something to do with personal experiences ! I think a lot of people have these really bad days, working , being tired, everything goes wrong and when you find some time on your own, you’re releasing all you kept, for days, weeks months or even years. That’s something i see many people are more and more confronted today with work pressure / depression/ anger issues / abuse and so much more. So its personal first but i guess everyone can understand.”
The title suggests that there’s a point where the brain simply cannot take any more. Do you think people genuinely reach their limits, or do they sometimes discover that what they thought was their limit was actually a breaking point they were conditioned to tolerate?
“thats a good one hahaha. I guess every one have their own limit and someday you’re far from reaching the top, but the day after l, nothing can leads you to a breaking point. It’s pretty much a burnout, but not specially about working, so like having a madness gauge that fills up every time something bad happen. Some people are conscious about this and can make it decrease, some people don’t even know the gauge is half full. So yeah I’d say both.“
Your new single is under two minutes long. Was there a point where you realized the song didn’t need room to breathe that its entire identity depended on hitting the listener hard and getting out?
“Absolutely! The idea with this song is that we wanted to give the listener the intensity that the track got. We wanted something violent and short that brings you into freaking out, with a purpose of simply experience it or make it relatable.”
When you’re writing something aggressive, how do you distinguish between music that sounds angry and music that actually communicates anger? What makes the difference between noise and something emotionally honest?
“its really interesting because in my opinion it’s hard to tell the difference. Especially in metal and its subgenres, compared to pop or rock because we often don’t clearly know what the song is about if we don’t read the lyrics. (Godamn vocalists out there are screaming hahahah) Even if i personally love some deathcore vocals and noises , I like to have a few words or sentences that are really understandable to make it clear. Sometimes it’s more of a feeling thing, I’m sure you can tell when a song is honestly emotional, like , it has its own signature.”
When you first envisioned the music video, what was the one feeling or image you knew you needed to communicate that the song alone couldn’t fully express?
“I’d say the stop motion letterings, because of the lyrics impacts, but also some of the animations (by guyguy and neyssan) that are bringing more obvious emotions with the visual representation!“
The title “The Extreme Limit of What My Brain Can Handle” suggests mental overload. Did you approach the video as a literal representation of that feeling, or did you want to create something that leaves the viewer feeling just as overwhelmed as the title suggests?
“both ! The idea was to make the viewer questioning on what he just saw hahaha , we wanted the visuals to match the song lyrically and having a representation of what going on your mind when you’re overloaded. We wanted a loss of words , exactly like when you reach the limit your brain can handle.”
If someone watched the video without sound, what would you hope they understood about the emotional world of SPLEEN?
“This track is a bit different because it goes more into insanity and what leads you to losing control. But in general, our main goal is to tell people we are all humans after all and so we all have emotions, and it can be joy and happiness, but it can be extremely sad and destructive, and THAT’S OK. We like to remind people that they aren’t the only ones going through shit.“
Were there specific images, objects, locations, or visual details included in the video that carry a deeper meaning for you personally?
“At first, I personally didn’t have specific ideas when we shot for this video, (shout-out Yannis LCR) but when we did some stop motion scratching shots, , I reminded having a crazy nightmare in which I was in the middle of a ghost town driving nails in my own head. This is why you can see nails in my head in one of theses images!”
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