Premiere: X. ARI splits her mental threads with new EP, ‘Uni-Fi’

Culturally, it once was disgustingly acceptable to call someone “crazy” for their terrifying struggles with mental health. Deeply-ghoulish fiends whose root cause was unexplainable have come into more enlightened focus. Thankfully, we, as a society, have seemingly moved on from such labels and allowed the conversation to open up. From such major stars as Ariana Grande and Janet Jackson coming forward with their own stories, the stigma has certainly lessened than what it was just five or 10 years ago. The outward ripples can not be overstated; the implications on the human condition and art itself is altogether colossal.  Examining her own sense of self, alt-pop arrival X. ARI takes her mangled mental state in her hands and rearranges the pieces into a stunning, visceral and potent body of work with her new EP, Uni-Fi. Funky, and a little bit fresh, the six-song setpiece slurps between bubblegum pop and flighty, arresting hip-hop (“La La La”) with acrobatic ease, even permitting her to tear away the splashy production for moments of cerebral clarity (“Everywhere”).

Along her travels, a pathway of scorched, barren earth, she collects and gathers the parts of herself she had assumed lost forever to decay. “You picked me up / But you brought your friends / I needed you, but you wanted them,” she crows with kickstarter “Break-Point,” which connects her spiraling out to a disastrous and toxic relationship. She pins her pain to the wall, sticky and dripping, and as her story unfolds, she revisits the psychological mosaic again and again to uncover new truths. With the title song, a lacy R&B slow-burn, she fights against her instincts to finally marry together the combating shades of herself into one. She also explores her darker side in the form of her male alter-ego, whose voice douses her world with a crucial, pulsating darkness ⏤ only in misery can we come closer to understand the true sensation of joy.

She reaches her sojourn’s apex on the aptly-titled “Yin Yang,” a slyly gooey cut that sees her broken halves fuse back together. “Just wake me up / I’ll sleep instead,” she sings in distorted flairs, her selves wiggling together as a refurbished whole. “That’s when I’m born again,” she later concedes of the new entity that has risen triumphant out of the mud. Then, the synth-saturated, rather trippy, bookender “Lift Up” blends her masterpiece of life, of sorrow, of redemption into a throaty, perhaps grunge-caked, anthem, which seems to punctuate the vitality of her hunger for all of it.

On the EP, premiering today, she writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “‘Uni-Fi’ is a duality concept EP where I explore dichotomy and topics of mental health, resilience and courage to have the confidence to be yourself without judgements,” she says. “I introduced my alter ego, IRA X., to express the binary aspects of life: the dark and light and the masculine and feminine aspects we all embody. The idea is we all have fragmented parts and are seeking unification, but sometimes we need to breakdown and break apart before we can become whole.”

X. ARI’s Uni-Fi EP drops everywhere tomorrow (June 27).

Listen below:

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