Unmasked was our third OLDER album, released in 2024, and like our previous album HUMAN+, it was written with theme in mind. Before writing it, we had both been diagnosed with adult ADHD in our 50s, and suddenly our entire lives were viewed through a completely different lens. Not in a tragic “everything was awful” sort of way because we’d managed life reasonably well. But it was one giant “ohhhh… THAT explains a few things!”
Patterns, ways of thinking and creative chaos made sense. Once you understand your own framework, you stop fighting yourself. Instead of constantly asking, “Why am I like this?” you start thinking, “Okay… so this is how my brain works.” That was a huge shift for both of us.
So naturally we ended up writing an entire album inspired by ADHD. Not specifically for people with ADHD and certainly not in a self-indulgent “poor us” kind of way. The songs still needed to stand on their own and mean something to anyone listening. But ADHD absolutely runs right through the bones of the album. We both realised that traces of it had always been there in our writing anyway. For example, there’s a track called Fallen Angel that Jel originally wrote when he was in his twenties and looking back now we can clearly hear those themes already sitting there decades before either of us had a diagnosis.
Around the same time Julie ended up writing The Missing Piece, a book about late-diagnosed ADHD in women, which HarperCollins published. Then came the ADHDifference podcast, focusing on ADHD as a difference rather than purely a disorder. So Unmasked really became part of this much bigger chapter in our lives.
The songs themselves tackle different angles of the ADHD experience without spelling everything out too literally. Iceberg became one of the key tracks for this. The whole idea being that you only ever see about 10% of an iceberg above the surface and people are much the same. The real bulk, the complicated messy emotional stuff, sits underneath where nobody sees it. That feels very ADHD to us. People often only see the “public” version of someone and never the constant noise, overthinking, intensity or exhaustion underneath. We’ve never been terribly interested in surface-level small talk anyway. We’d rather skip straight past “What do you do?” and into “Who are you really?”
The Iceberg video was ridiculous fun too. It was filmed in our garage complete with homemade snow made from bicarbonate soda and cornflour. A very glamorous rock’n’roll operation as you can imagine (not!).
Then there was Hogtied, which explored that feeling of being squeezed and shaped to fit into society’s expectations. The whole “square peg shoved into a round hole” experience many ADHD people know very well.
Flip Side headed in a completely different direction and looked back at growing up in the 70s, roaming freely all day on bikes, disappearing on adventures, getting muddy, getting lost, figuring things out. In hindsight, that freedom was probably incredibly healthy for ADHD kids like us.
And then there was Masquerade, which touched on masking, pretending and toning yourself down. Hiding parts of yourself because you worry you’re “too much” what others will think. The whole point of the song is basically saying, “No more of that. This is me. Take it or leave it.”
The closing track, Wiser, remains one of our favourite songs. I was a letter back to our younger selves saying, “You’re going to be okay.” It felt like closure in a strange way. Not the end of something sad, but the beginning of understanding ourselves properly. The video for Wiser was also the first time we fully embraced AI. We brought old family photos to life because we had almost no moving footage from our childhoods. Seeing little moments suddenly animated was surprisingly emotional, especially seeing glimpses of parents and younger versions of ourselves moving for the first time.
The best way to describe Unmasked is energetic, messy, emotional, bitey in places, thoughtful in others. A very ADHD album and very much us.
