Aries is working out his story

“It’s an inexplicable thing, right?” Aries – whose real name is available online but not actively shared around – says animatedly from the front seat of his car. He calls me in the early morning as the blue sky peeks in through the windows. “Sometimes I’ll get that feeling, like I just caught lightning in a bottle, and it’ll be a completely unfinished song – but I feel it.”

GLASS JAW, Aries’ newest venture, sees him polishing his antipop status with his hip-hop and R&B roots, but despite the deft composition and production, it’s also Aries’ most raw work. “It was actually very much a natural process for me. I think I’m open across all my records. It’s just this one,” he hesitates for a moment – “I had some things I needed to say and needed to get off my chest, and making music is a very therapeutic thing for me.”

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Building bridges between lyrical concepts introduced in previous records and new explorations, GLASS JAW has a tone that feels not somber, but pensive. Reflecting deeply on the past and who he is presently, the newest LP has served as a mirror for Aries to truly get out what he had on his chest. “I feel like my subconscious has just sponged up everything as I’ve grown, and has had quiet conversations with my conscious mind,” he contemplates, as the world of GLASS JAW emerged from the visual and sonic depths of Aries’ mind, with or without his knowing. “I’m constantly making music. Some of these efforts aren’t conscious. They’re subconscious efforts that, over time as I’m growing, my subconscious mind and my conscious mind are having this dialogue without me knowing.”

Aries’ four-year hiatus had fans scratching their heads and wondering if their post notifications were still on, thinking the artist was on a dreaded leave of absence, especially given the heightened success of his debut. WELCOME HOME garnered over 200 million streams, and his sophomore LP, BELIEVE IN ME, WHO BELIEVES IN YOU, rose to #7 on the Spotify charts and has racked up nearly 120 million streams.

But he never stopped creating; he just felt like he didn’t have something with which it was worth following up his first two successful records. “I wasn't taking a break,” he clarifies, “I was just figuring out what I wanted to do. I had made another album in between BELIEVE IN ME and GLASS JAW and it just didn’t sit right with my soul. It didn’t feel fulfilling to me.” To Aries, being able to feel the music is everything. “It had songs that I knew maybe fans would like and enjoy, but I didn’t feel that feeling of ecstasy or fulfillment.”

“It’s a gut feeling and it’s like magic,” Aries explains of a song that makes its way onto a full-length release. “That’s what I'm always striving for.” GLASS JAW in its entirety offered that feeling to him, developing from the pure, instinctual nature of how the music communicated the tone, the emotion that Aries strives to make a listener feel – a skill he refined on this newest piece of work.

“I think I respected the songs for what they were trying to be. I respected dynamics and moments in songs, where in the past, I would want to do a lot with the production. But I let the song guide itself.” And from first track, the title track, GLASS JAW guides the reader into a world created by Aries, showcasing the foundations he was built on, with an insouciant glide that is partially due to the few touch-ups to the work, allowing for it to be consumed as it was meant to be. “I knew sonically I wanted to record things into a microphone and have fewer digital elements and be very tactile – as producers and engineers would say ‘less in the box,’ meaning fewer touch-ups.”

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A world that plays with the literal and metaphorical, Aries constructs his narrative with poise, eloquently describing the darker side of the impacts of living in an age where we’re so disconnectedly connected – intentionally or not – weaving a tale about unrealistic expectations, mental exhaustion, burnout, and the impact of a life that never truly stops. However, just as dichotomous as his subconscious and conscious, visual and sonic elements play a part in the way Aries communicates his story, specifically the story of GLASS JAW: “There’s two parts to it. There’s the sonic side, the music itself, which is very – especially this time around – it’s more vulnerable. It is on the nose. It’s a little bit uncomfortable for me, honestly, to dissect and break down things.”

He continues: “And I think the visual world is my way of telling it through this proxy wall that feels a little bit more comfortable. I don’t have to be so on-the-nose with everything. I can have this, it’s connected, but it’s disconnected. It’s this parallel world that I get to tell this story through metaphor.” Bringing the literal songs to a metaphorical state in music videos for nearly every single track on the album, a more cinematic telling of the stories Aries narrates throughout the record. At 27 years old, after his debut was released when he was just 21, he’s accumulated more stories, more perspectives, more experience – “It’s like you have to go live life a little bit and keep an open mind, an open heart to life.”

Aries started his music career young. At 13, he began rapping with his friends after school, learning how to freestyle, beginning to feel drawn to music in a way that he felt like he needed to continue. While ending up in a genre that is meant to be applied to artists defying certain labels and common techniques while still having that ear worm, Aries’ beginnings in rap laid a foundation for him that didn’t quite go along with the status quo. “My approach to songwriting started very rap-focused. I started wanting to be a rapper and it was very much a heavy Lil Wayne influence in the beginning, and A$AP Rocky influence.”

Finding Linkin Park and being exposed to the world of nu-metal changed quite a bit for Aries, exposing him to visceral emotions he wanted to learn how to convey. Combined with his love for R&B, hip-hop, rap, and the genres’ “word painting,” he started piecing together a sound, a feeling, that he knew was his, and that made him feel that ecstasy, like he caught the lightning in a bottle. “I think over time, when I started out making music, I was really young and I didn’t have much of a story to tell. And as I’ve grown older, I do have a story and I want people to know that story through the music,” Aries reflects, looking through the windshield of his car, nearly seven years after his debut, over 2,500 days of life lived and feelings felt, “because that’s the way that I would like to tell it.”