I ran into AroMa on the street this week, and they were on a mission to get their new music on the radio: “I’ve just been going around to radio stations and handing out CDs all day. Real selling-the-mixtape-out-of-the-trunk-of-my-car energy. I went to the back door at KXSF and there were all these intimidating white punk dudes smoking and standing around. Turned out the person I was looking for wasn’t even there, so I ended up chopping it up with these guys until one went inside saying, ‘I’m going to put this on right now.’ I was shocked.”
With AroMa’s attention to detail, innovative sound, and willingness to flaunt traditional creative boundaries, I’ll personally be shocked if they aren’t one-day recognized as one of the great post-soul eccentrics. Smitten takes AroMa’s genre-bending style farther in the rock direction, but retains its funk backbone, r&b emotion, pop deliciousness, hip-hop politics, new wave danceability, and experimental curiosity. There’s a lot going on, but it all comes together with trademark “virgo execution.”
I’ve seen the full range this year—AroMa puts on an equally mesmerizing show dancing around a backyard fire pit at a friend’s rent party as they do in a mainstage self-curated interdisciplinary production. Aside from being a fantastic musician and performer, AroMa boldly begs an important question of their audience: how does artistic transgression transform our hearts? What potential does this transformative power have to resist violence in the belly of the imperial beast?
Francesca T. Royster writes about “post-soul eccentrics:” post-civil rights era Black musicians like Eartha Kitt, Prince, and Janelle Monae who embrace offbeat aesthetics that play with gender expectations. These artists use their individuality as a form of social critique. They not only upend gender norms, but challenge expectations about the accessible limits of Black self-expression and therefore selfhood.
Last year, one of AroMa’s collaborative productions pushed the above themes into an explicit discussion about the role art might play in politics. Promoting this show, called Babylon, AroMa wrote that the U.S. empire is a monster that “enacts genocide, imprisons our people, and seeks to consume our hearts along with the rest of the world.” In this context, art as avant-garde self-expression can help citizens under liberal empire to achieve a level of sovereignty over their own hearts—to grow, break, and soothe them without needing outside permission. In the fight to stay human under capitalism, this is important work. Assimilation is a trap; music can help even audiences to get free and stay free.
Babylon put AroMa’s eccentricity on full display. Through multiple costume changes, they went from diva to demon to soldier to shapeless form. They’re graceful but muscular and have a deeper voice than one might expect. They adopt a peculiar angular poise that reminds me of Grace Jones (noted post-soul eccentric). They have the dynamism of a glamorous centipede. It’s hard to look away.
The performance also included drag, poetry, hardcore, and dance music from an array of local queer/trans artists. Multidisciplinarity already defined AroMa’s career at a young age when they produced and scored short films Zoombug and Moonbaby in their early 20s. Their refusal to conform to gender, genre, or even medium reinforces AroMa’s resistance to categorization.
With new EP Smitten, the project sounds a bit more grounded than on in precedent, the jazzier Symphony No Harmony. It’s still something dug out of a time capsule from a future century, rife with spacey guitars and echoing vocals. “Goldmine” opens with percussion in the foreground and accelerates to a cantering gait. The bass comes in hard and fuzzy, balancing the sung falsetto. You could march to it, but it’s deeply strange still. “Need them on a track, no, an album with Yves Tumor,” exclaimed my roommate as we listened to the single together. “Territory” feels just a bit lighter, featuring an effervescent steel drum synth sound. Halfway through the song, the bassline becomes intricate and unpredictable. On the other hand, AroMa’s lyrics are heavier and discuss feeling sensitive and competitive with someone you care for: “If you don’t want to fall in love I understand. To tell you how I feel gives you the upper hand,” they lament. On “Eyes,” the emotions stay heavy, but shift toward security. “When I look in your eyes, I belong,” they sing. Though these lyrics aren’t explicitly political, usually it’s in the depths of personal relationships that our big ideas about social perception, essence, and difference are most deeply felt. Only through another’s eyes do we become real. “Armageddon,” is explosive, layering vocal harmonies over another deliciously unusual bassline and rock-and-roll production that builds to an emotional explosion.
The love and pain expressed on this record are serious, but they are presented with the remove of a confident observer. The tone is perfect for the project’s theme: “love does not destroy you.”
