APACALDA Finds Her Voice in the House of the Dead

Cassandra Angheluta embraces trauma and transformation on her debut album, There’s A Shadow In My Room And It Isn’t Mine.

By Stephan Boissonneault

Photos by Stephan Boissonneault

Published on June 11, 2025

The chapel smells like dust, wilted flowers, and whatever air freshener this particular funeral home uses to mask the inevitability of death. As a light rain falls outside, the chapel’s stained glass, which depicts an angel and two people holding urns, casts a chilling amber and blue coloured light across the rows of empty pews. It’s a place of quiet reflection, a space where silence has weight and every groan or creak from the building, or every breath, sounds like a question with no answer. It’s a place where Montreal artist Cassandra Angheluta, known in the music world as APACALDA, spends a lot of her time.

The music on her upcoming debut album, There’s A Shadow In My Room And It Isn’t Mine (out June 13 via Behave)—equal parts gothic lullabies and synth rock-soaked exorcism—wouldn’t feel out of place echoing off these vaulted ceilings during a particularly stylish wake. So here we sit, beneath the watchful eyes of long-dead saints, and get into it: death, rebirth, and how to turn existential dread into something we can dance to.

Angheluta thinks about death quite often. In her day-to-day job, she’s a funeral attendant, the person who prepares a room for the family before the funeral and is there for whatever emotional or logistical support they need. Her coworkers, the deceased, change every day, whether displayed as bodies or inside of urns. She sets the flower arrangements, lights the candles, lays out old photographs and personal effects of the deceased, and usually has about an hour alone with them before the family arrives.

“Some people are really uncomfortable with dead bodies, and I’ve noticed that I’m not,” she says. “I like to look at this person, at their items and photos that the family brings, and get a glimpse into their world, this human’s existence that I know nothing about. Then I get to play the funeral’s interior designer.”

Is it a bit morbid? Sure, but to Angheluta, it’s also beautiful. She’s always had a curiosity about death: her father died when she was quite young, and before she got the funeral attendant job, she read Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons From The Crematory, a book that sparked even more interest in the macabre and Western culture’s beliefs around it.

“I think that subconsciously, having experienced death at such a young age and still processing it today, 25 years later, I think that it helps me,” she says, as a shiver momentarily comes over her. “I mean, there are definitely ghosts here.”

There’s A Shadow In My Room And It Isn’t Mine is also obsessed with death, but not in the literal sense. Across 11 tracks, songs like “She’s Not Coming,” “Dead Weight,” and “Almost Burnt The House Down” treat endings as sonic rituals, slow deaths we endure every day: identity shedding, emotional moulting, or the uncomfortable silence that follows after truth you can’t un-hear.

Each track draws listeners into an atmospheric world where gritty guitars and layered synthesizers meet, softened by melodic moments that provide calm amid the album’s intensity and Angheluta’s powerful voice.

The album’s emotional weight is magnified by Angheluta’s collaborators, each one bringing their own shadows to the sound. Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson, TEKE::TEKE, FHANG) lays down basslines that feel like rhythmic, gravitational pulls. JUNO-winning producer and engineer Sam Woywitka (Half Moon Run, SAMWOY, FHANG) crafts the album’s immersive sonic landscape, building a world you can sink into—or get lost in entirely. Christophe Lamarche (Charlotte Cardin) threads in textures that shimmer, fracture, and linger, sharpening the emotional edge of the record without ever dulling its strangeness.

“It’s very much about death and rebirth. The symbol of an ouroboros, constantly dying and rebirthing,” she says. “I think that’s what the focus is on; what has traumatized me and/or others around me that I observe. I talk about sexual assault and suicide, and those are quite literal topics.”

Then there are more abstract themes like jealousy and obsession. “It’s taking those experiences and asking yourself, ‘How can I be a better person?’ and ‘How can I evolve through whatever happened to me and not have it just become my identity?” she says.

Sometimes, metaphorically, that evolution requires spewing the toxic stuff out. The album art, created from a portrait of Angheluta by photographer Tyler Udall, and then transformed by experimental visual artist Ramona Zordini through a technique called cyanotype, features her fractured face, mid-scream, expelling all of the emotional waste from her mouth.

“There was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh no, is this too weird? Do I look like I’m puking?’ But I love it,” she says. “I’m word vomiting and releasing all this shit that’s living in me, so I think it’s perfect.”

The album title reads like a whispered confession or the first line of a ghost story. In reality, it’s a phrase that comes from a little girl, something Angheluta heard from her personal trainer.

“It’s Friday the 13th and she’s like, ‘My three-year-old daughter came into my room last night and said the fucking creepiest thing,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘What?’ She’s like, ‘Mommy, there’s a shadow in my room and it isn’t mine.’”

Whether it was that child’s gift for the unknown or just something a kid said, it completely summed up the whole album for Angheluta.

“It’s about the parts of yourself you no longer recognize, the ones that linger even after you think you’ve moved on.”

The shadow isn’t a figure in the dark. It’s a feeling, an echo of a former self that refuses to leave quietly. It’s the emotional residue of change, the awkward presence in the room. The album becomes a kind of exorcism—not of evil, but of personal stasis.