Sometimes an album tells you exactly what it means while you are making it. Other times, you finish the bloody thing, live a little more life and realise the songs understood where you were heading before you did.
That is pretty close to what happened to Astrum Lux Lucis with One World (R)evolution’s Reflections Of Resilience.
Released on August 28 through AstraLux Records, the eleven-track album moves through self-examination, manipulation, isolation, strength, losing control, taking it back, healing and eventually searching for some kind of peace. Musically, One World (R)evolution wrap those ideas inside modern hard rock, alternative metal and metalcore, where huge melodic choruses collide with syncopated rhythms, electronics and much heavier moments.
After sitting down with Astrum for Crannk, though, the album started looking less like a collection of empowerment songs and more like another stage in a transformation that has been happening for decades.
Astrum’s musical history stretches back through punk, metal, singer-songwriter material and years of performing under the name Cheryl Hill before Astrum Lux Lucis and One World (R)evolution ever existed. The philosophy behind the project has long been summed up by one idea: revolution requires evolution.
What has changed over the years is where Astrum has been looking for that revolution. Earlier material often looked towards society and the world outside. On Reflections Of Resilience, the hardest place to look is directly into the mirror.
The Go-Go’s Changed Everything
Before the metal, heavy riffs and philosophy, there were The Go-Go’s.
Astrum had already grown up surrounded by music. Her mother played piano, there was always an instrument in the house and Astrum had played trumpet and saxophone through school. She even remembers taking private saxophone lessons from Neal Schon’s father.
Then, around the summer of 1981, MTV arrived and a young Astrum saw The Go-Go’s performing “Our Lips Are Sealed.”
That was the moment everything shifted.
She had seen other powerful women in rock, including Heart and Pat Benatar, but something about watching five women completely owning the stage suddenly changed what seemed possible.
“I didn’t know I could do that,” she remembered.
Astrum had previously imagined becoming a doctor or dentist, although by her own admission that probably would have gone badly considering her dislike of blood, needles and even cutting raw steak. Music offered a different path, and she wanted to become a drummer.
Her parents got her a kit and lessons, and before long that path led into teenage punk band Private Outrage. Within only a couple of years of beginning drums, Astrum found herself playing the band’s first show at San Francisco venue On Broadway, opening for the Circle Jerks.
At fifteen years old, it must have felt like everything was about to take off. Life, as it tends to do, had other plans.
What never disappeared was the rhythmic foundation. Astrum still considers starting out as a drummer fundamental to how she understands music, whether she is playing guitar, arranging vocals or directing musicians in One World (R)evolution. She described learning to clap rhythmic patterns before attempting notes on guitar, while that same awareness now allows her to deliberately play with vocal phrasing, moving slightly ahead or behind expectation to pull the listener’s attention back into a song.
That becomes particularly relevant on Reflections Of Resilience, where rhythm often does much more than simply carry the songs forward. Syncopation, repetition, sudden shifts and arrangements that barely seem to breathe often mirror whatever psychological state the lyrics are moving through.
The drummer never really disappeared. She just eventually moved to the front of the stage.
Cheryl Hill Had To Become Astrum Lux Lucis
One of the most revealing parts of our conversation came when we moved into Astrum’s change of identity.
Long before One World (R)evolution, there were years of music released under Cheryl Hill. By around 2009, though, the person attached to that name no longer felt like somebody Astrum completely recognised.
She had become sober several years earlier and told me that January will mark 21 years. That process came alongside meditation, personal development and a much wider reassessment of who she was and how she wanted to exist in the world.
Looking backwards, Astrum described Cheryl as somebody incredibly self-destructive and driven heavily by ego, living through an almost weaponised version of not giving a fuck. As that person began disappearing, the old name started feeling attached to a version of herself she no longer wanted to inhabit.
The idea of taking another name came through a friend involved in Astrum’s spiritual development. During meditation, the phrase that eventually emerged was “Shining Starlight.”
Astrum immediately knew there was no bloody way she was walking around introducing herself as Shining Starlight.
Translating the idea eventually led to Astrum Lux Lucis.
Funny as the story is when she tells it, adopting the name carried considerably more weight than simply rebranding herself as an artist. To Astrum, the meaning behind it implied responsibility, integrity and authenticity. If that was the identity she was choosing, she also had to live up to it.
Even that process has kept evolving. Astrum spoke about gradually letting go of labels she once used to define herself: vegan, sober, musician, rock star and all the other boxes humans tend to build around themselves. Those things might describe choices, roles or chapters in somebody’s life, but they are not necessarily the person underneath.
“My identity is human,” she told me.
That ongoing deconstruction sits right at the centre of Reflections Of Resilience. The album repeatedly strips away the temptation to solve internal problems by changing everything outside ourselves. Eventually, somebody has to look inward.
Revolution Requires Evolution
That brings everything back to the philosophy that has followed One World (R)evolution since the beginning.
Revolution requires evolution.
Astrum understood that idea intellectually years ago. Living it was another matter entirely.
She described life repeatedly humbling her, stripping away ego and gradually changing her perspective from asking what everybody else could do for her towards asking how she could actually be of service to somebody else.
The earlier One World (R)evolution material often looked outward towards society, collective behaviour and the need for broader change. On Reflections Of Resilience, many of those same questions have turned around.
What am I contributing? Why did that person trigger me? Why am I giving somebody else control over my emotional state? What am I projecting onto the world around me, and what happens when the thing I most desperately want somebody else to change is something I actually need to confront within myself?
That is where the album title starts carrying more weight.
Resilience isn’t simply about surviving whatever life throws at you. Sometimes it means admitting that the way you have been responding to life isn’t working either.
The Awakening Is Still Alive
Digging through the older One World (R)evolution material before this interview led me back to “I Need Out” and another album that never arrived.
Around 2020, Astrum had been discussing a concept record titled The Awakening, built around addiction, depression and transcendence. With so much thematic crossover into Reflections Of Resilience, I wondered whether the newer record had effectively swallowed that unfinished idea.
It hasn’t.
Astrum told me she still intends to finish The Awakening and believes part of the reason it remains unfinished is because she is continuing to live through the process that album is supposed to document. That project is much more deliberately autobiographical.
Reflections Of Resilience became autobiographical in a much stranger way.
Astrum explained that she wasn’t necessarily sitting down and writing every part of this album directly from her own experiences. Her role involved singing, directing what she wanted the songs to explore and changing particular lyrical lines, while much of the material arrived for her to learn and inhabit.
Then life started catching up with the songs.
It wasn’t until later, particularly while working through the detailed intake process for the album campaign, that Astrum began properly analysing what each track was saying and recognising how closely those ideas now reflected what she had been experiencing herself.
She compared the feeling to Interstellar, almost as though a future version of herself had somehow been pushing the right book from the shelf.
The songs came first, and then she began living through them.
By the time Reflections Of Resilience was ready to properly enter the world, Astrum could look back and realise it had become considerably more autobiographical than she ever intended.
Sometimes we write the music. Sometimes the music seems to be waiting for us to catch up.
Eleven Songs Found Each Other Through Resilience
There was considerably more material available than what eventually made the record.
Astrum and producer/songwriter Dusten “Dusty” Boles had worked across roughly twenty-two songs, with the eleven that became Reflections Of Resilience ultimately chosen because their lyrical themes belonged together.
These were the songs dealing most directly with what resilience actually requires: recognition, boundaries, control, uncertainty, self-awareness and the willingness to keep moving when growth refuses to follow a straight line.
The remaining material sits a little differently. Astrum described those songs as leaning more towards human relationships, not necessarily romantic relationships, but the many ways people interact, affect and respond to one another.
That means Reflections Of Resilience wasn’t necessarily written from beginning to end as one predetermined conceptual journey. The journey revealed itself through selection.
Astrum initially pulled the album together during 2025 while working on physical CDs and a free-plus-shipping campaign. It was only later, while properly dissecting the record and its ideas, that the connections became impossible to ignore.
That also explains why songs from the album had already existed individually for quite some time before the full record appeared. Once they were placed alongside one another, though, the sequence created another story.
And that story had to begin with a war.
Everything Starts With The Person In The Mirror
Opening track “War With The Real Me” establishes the record’s entire philosophy.
There is no victory lap and no giant declaration that Astrum has conquered everything and emerged indestructible. Instead, the album begins with recognition.
Astrum believes meaningful change starts by being willing to examine yourself under the microscope, but there was another important qualifier in her answer: that examination has to happen gently, kindly and lovingly.
Beating the shit out of yourself for every mistake might look like accountability from the outside, but Astrum has lived enough of that approach to know it rarely produces anything useful.
The harder work is observation. Why did something trigger anger? Why are you giving a stranger in traffic enough power to ruin your emotional state? What does your response reveal about you?
Astrum used driving in Los Angeles as a very real example, because apparently nothing tests your inner peace quite like the 405.
That ability to step outside the first reaction and examine it becomes essential to “War With The Real Me.” We naturally want to fix our circumstances, change another person or convince the world to behave according to our expectations, but other people remain stubbornly outside our control.
The only response we genuinely own is our own.
That idea sits right at the heart of One World (R)evolution. If changing the world begins with changing ourselves, then the revolution can’t always be directed outwards.
Taking Control Doesn’t Mean You Know Where You’re Going
This is where the album sequencing gets particularly interesting.
“Take Control” is followed immediately by “Lost.”
I love that decision because it completely fucks with the easy motivational version of resilience. A cleaner story would tell us that somebody recognises the problem, decides to act, takes control and suddenly walks into the sunset knowing exactly who they are and where they are heading.
That isn’t how life works.
Astrum laughed when I described that contradiction because, for her, the journey is anything but a straight line.
“It’s the worst roller coaster ever. But at the same time, it’s the greatest roller coaster ever.”
Taking control removes one problem but can immediately reveal another. When you have spent years defining yourself around a person, behaviour, addiction, identity or circumstance, removing it can create an enormous empty space.
Freedom doesn’t automatically provide directions.
Astrum prefers describing her own journey as expanding consciousness rather than awakening or spirituality, partly because even spiritual identity can become another platform for the ego to climb onto.
There is no final level where you suddenly become enlightened enough that nothing hurts, confuses or pisses you off ever again. Darkness remains part of the experience, and Astrum’s point is not that we should avoid it but that experiencing those darker places can change our capacity to recognise light when it appears.
The contradiction running from “Take Control” into “Lost” becomes one of the most honest things about the record. You can make the right decision for yourself and still feel completely fucking lost afterwards.
Both can be true.
Fractured Doesn’t Try To Hide The Cracks
That idea becomes even more personal on “Fractured.”
The song draws from kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery in a way that highlights the fractures instead of disguising them. Damage becomes part of the object rather than something that needs to be erased before it can be considered whole again.
For Astrum, the past five years in particular have involved confronting old resentment and blame around childhood, adolescence, career decisions and paths she believed had been blocked by other people.
During our conversation she also spoke candidly about a suicide attempt in 1996, the fear she carried around facing life after college and the ways blame could provide somewhere to hide from decisions she wasn’t ready to make.
It is a heavy moment in the conversation, but it also gives the kintsugi imagery considerably more meaning.
Astrum spoke about a time when she would have happily rewritten huge sections of her life. Never done this. Never trusted that person. Never gone through that experience.
Now she isn’t so certain.
Remove everything painful and you also remove everything those experiences eventually changed. Would the person standing here now still exist?
That is where the kintsugi imagery becomes much more than a clever lyrical metaphor.
Healing doesn’t have to mean recreating the version of yourself that existed before something happened. Sometimes that person is gone, and sometimes becoming somebody different is part of the healing itself.
The scars, mistakes, losses and fractures become part of the thing being rebuilt.
Strength Isn’t The Same Thing As Peace
That takes us into the final track, “Missing Peace,” and another sequencing choice that stayed with me after the interview.
“Strong I Am” arrives at track three.
Peace doesn’t arrive until track eleven.
That distance matters because strength, survival, healing and peace might overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.
Astrum ultimately brought all four back to another deceptively simple idea: choice.
How do I want to show up in this moment? What am I going to allow to control me? What am I prepared to give power to?
Astrum isn’t pretending anybody masters that perfectly. She joked that maybe the target is somewhere around ninety per cent peace, because nobody is going to completely nail the thing.
There will always be another layer. She compared it to peeling an onion, with more to discover every time you think you might finally have reached the centre.
That is why “Missing Peace” works so well as the closing statement. It doesn’t suggest the journey is finished. It suggests Astrum has developed another way of moving through it.
Resilience Doesn’t Have A Finish Line
The more I thought about Reflections Of Resilience after speaking with Astrum, the less it felt like an album offering answers and the more it felt like an album documenting questions somebody has learned to ask differently.
The teenage drummer who saw The Go-Go’s and suddenly realised another life was possible is still in there. So is Cheryl Hill, the punk kid opening for the Circle Jerks and the person who went through addiction, sobriety, anger, spiritual searching, ego, regret and years of questioning why certain parts of life never followed the path she expected.
Astrum Lux Lucis didn’t erase those people. She became another stage in their evolution.
That is perhaps where One World (R)evolution’s central philosophy finally connects most clearly with Reflections Of Resilience. Revolution does require evolution, but evolution isn’t some clean transformation where yesterday’s version disappears and tomorrow’s version arrives perfectly formed.
It is messy. You take control and become lost, become strong and still search for peace, repair yourself while leaving the cracks visible and look into the mirror knowing there will probably always be something else asking to be understood.
Even The Awakening, the album that seemed to have vanished years ago, remains unfinished because Astrum’s own story apparently isn’t finished with it yet.
Maybe that is the whole bloody point.
At the end of our conversation, after talking about identity, resilience, darkness, choice and all the different ways humans manage to make this existence more complicated than it probably needs to be, Astrum boiled everything down to something far simpler.
“Just be kind, because you never know what somebody’s going through.”
For an artist who has spent years talking about revolution, that might be one of the most quietly powerful ideas of all.
Reflections Of Resilience is out now through AstraLux Records.
Watch the complete Crannk conversation with Astrum Lux Lucis as we dive into her earliest musical memories, The Go-Go’s, Private Outrage, the transformation from Cheryl Hill into Astrum Lux Lucis, the philosophy behind One World (R)evolution, the unfinished The Awakening, how Reflections Of Resilience unexpectedly became autobiographical, “War With The Real Me,” “Take Control,” “Lost,” “Fractured,” “Missing Peace” and what resilience actually looks like when life refuses to move in a straight line.
Reflections Of Resilience Track Listing
- War With The Real Me
- So Alive
- Strong I Am
- Today Is The Day
- Take Control
- Lost
- Chaos
- Ghost In The Mirror
- Complacency
- Fractured
- Missing Peace
One World (R)evolution Online
Official Website: https://oneworldrevolution.us
Bandcamp: https://oneworldrevolution.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OneWorldRevolution
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oneworldrevolution_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OneWorldRevolution
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1TQP9EWsbL7XxksqHdy1Ry
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/one-world-r-evolution/376582415
