I wasn’t ready for this one.
I already knew the backstory and for that reason it sat in my inbox for weeks. I knew Lael Summer had recorded “Insidious” on her iPhone six weeks before she died by suicide in 2017. I knew her mom, Marla Mase, was releasing it now—on purpose, during Mental Health Awareness Month—as part of The Lael Project to honor her legacy and help others survive. But even knowing all that… hearing it is something else entirely.
This song doesn’t ask to be heard. It insists.
Lael’s voice—still shaky, still fierce—is the original vocal take from her phone. There’s a kind of haunted intimacy in it. Like she’s sitting next to you. Like she knows you need to hear her say this, even now.
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“So, we meet again / my Houdini in a box,” she starts. And yeah, that line stopped me cold. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a diagnosis. She’s talking to her own mind. Her illness. Her terror. That thing that slips out of the shadows just when she thinks she’s escaped it. “Are you foe or are you friend?” she asks. You can hear her exhaustion. You can hear her trying to understand the thing that keeps dragging her back.
There’s no polished perfection here. But that’s what makes it cut even deeper. Every breath and every note feels like a fight between staying and leaving. “Didn’t listen when you spoke / you swallowed for me, and I choked.”
Fuck.
I sat with that line for a long time. I’ve choked before—on silence, on fear, on pretending to be okay when I wasn’t. But this isn’t performance. It’s real. She was 25, just a year younger than me, around the same age as people who read this website.
The track was shaped after the fact by producers Tomás Doncker and James Dellatacoma—people who clearly understood the assignment: don’t bury her. They didn’t. They built the track around her. The production lifts her but never drowns her. It stays raw, weirdly retro, neo-soul—the kind of sound that doesn’t chase trends because it’s not trying to win you over. It just wants to be honest.
And when she sings, “Insidious fear / how did you get here?”, it feels rhetorical. But it also feels real, like she’s still trying to figure out where it all began, where it all went wrong.
Later she pleads: “I know I need to shed some light / on the Keeper of the Night / this part of me I just can’t let go…” And if you’ve ever battled your own shit—depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction—you know that line too well. We want light, but we hold onto the dark because it’s familiar. Because it’s part of us. Because it rescues us in twisted, quiet ways. She says it outright: “rescues me when I just can’t cope.”
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She wasn’t weak. She was fucking brave. But she was tired.
Science, economists, and psychologists have not yet discovered the cost of lost talent. They’ve not quantified the ripple effects of people suddenly removed from this world. And they sure as hell haven’t figured out how to measure what Lael might’ve still given us if she’d had more time.
But her mom—musician and actress Marla Marla—understood that maybe what we needed wasn’t another album. Maybe we needed this. A piece of her daughter’s pain that didn’t get cleaned up. Didn’t get filtered. Didn’t get turned into some overproduced posthumous “tribute.” Just her voice. Her words. Her fight.
Lael Summer was already two albums in—Burden to Bear and Life in Color—before this. She had fans. She had talent. But Insidious is something different. It’s not a career move. It’s not even really a single. It’s an act of resistance.
And I don’t care who you are—if you’ve ever felt that shadow creep in, if you’ve ever asked “how did I get here?” then you need to hear this. Because someone else said it first, because she didn’t make it, but she still reached back to pull us forward.
