Animalic explores the instinct that exists beneath identity, civility, and performance. It asks what happens when the carefully constructed self begins to crack, and something older, stranger, or more primal pushes through.

This issue isn't about animals in a literal sense. It's about hunger, obsession, desire, violence, tenderness, territory, transformation, fear, ritual, survival, and the parts of ourselves that refuse to be domesticated. The moments where emotion overrides logic, where the body remembers before the mind can explain.

Across fiction, poetry, essays, photography, fashion, visual art, interviews, and experimental work, Animalic examines human nature at its most exposed. Contributors approach the theme from wildly different angles: mania as transcendence, femininity as performance, bodily horror, inherited instinct, intimacy, shame, appetite, grief, dreams, identity, mythology, ecology, and the blurred boundary between the human and the non-human.

Visually, the issue leans into a raw, tactile editorial language inspired by independent print culture and 90s magazine design. Muted palettes, grain, collage, handwritten elements, and stark typography create something that feels collected rather than manufactured, ejecting algorithmic perfection in favour of texture, imperfection, and emotional honesty.

Animalic is ultimately an exploration of what lives beneath the surface. It is interested in contradiction: beauty alongside brutality, vulnerability alongside aggression, control alongside surrender. It asks readers not to tame these impulses, but to look directly at them, to consider the animal not as something separate from ourselves, but as something that has always been there.