ARI LEE Burned the Boats. But on the other shore comes new single 'Break The Habit'
Ten years is a long time to put something down. ARI LEE spent a decade neglecting her passions, watching distractions accumulate into something that started to look like a life.
Break The Habit', out today, is the sound of someone who finally answered that question and didn't look back.
The penultimate single ahead of her sophomore EP What Happens When You Fall In Love In Stepford?, dropping 6th November, the track is about shedding false security in all its forms: bad habits, relationships that keep you comfortable and small, the quiet agreements we make with ourselves to stay exactly where we are. "Burn the boats," Lee told herself. "Because the love that kept me afloat, held me back." As lines go, it is one that earns the weight placed on it.
Sonically and visually, Lee is working in the territory of memory and escape. The world she has built around this era draws on dollhouses and abandoned spaces, digi cams and film photos and scrapbooks: nostalgia as something to move through. The familiar imagery carries an unease beneath the surface, a tension between what feels safe and what is actually true. It is a smart visual language for a record about leaving.
Accompanying the single is a dance performance video, directed by Jean Yuzheng and choreographed by Mitzi Trought, that returns Lee to her dance roots. The decision to bring movement into this moment is not incidental. 'Break The Habit' is a song about the body finally doing what the mind has been putting off.
What Happens When You Fall In Love In Stepford? picks up where Lee's debut EP Trophy Wife In Training left off: ARI fighting her way out of the suburbs, shedding the traditions and stereotypes women are handed without asking for them, only to fall in love somewhere along the way out. Now on the outskirts, looking back, she's realising Stepford was never as black and white as it appeared from inside it. The sophomore EP promises to hold that complexity without simplifying it.
The Hong Kong-born, London-based indie alt-pop artist has built this world carefully and with considerable momentum behind her. Trophy Wife In Training earned placement across 33 global Spotify Editorial playlists including Fresh Finds and All New Pop, A-list radio support from Future Hits Radio UK, and editorial features from EARMILK, Atwood Magazine, and Resonate. Lee writes, in her own words, for "the baddies and the saddies": the people who contain the inner conflict of wanting to be loved and needing to be free at the same time.
'Break The Habit' is not a resolution to that conflict. It is the moment the conflict stops being an excuse.
'Break The Habit' is out 2nd October. What Happens When You Fall In Love In Stepford? arrives 6th November.
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