Ari Lee Explores Self Preservation With New Track 'Break The Habit' - A Review
Let's talk about what it actually costs to choose yourself…
Not in the motivational-poster sense, not in the way that self-help language has smoothed the edges off something genuinely difficult, but in the specific, material, years-of-your-life sense. Ari Lee spent ten years neglecting her passions. She has said so plainly, without softening the number or qualifying what she means by it. Every distraction felt like a test. Every vice was a question she kept failing to answer correctly. Am I done self-sabotaging? Am I done watering my dreams down? The answer she eventually arrived at was not inspirational. It was simply inevitable. It was now or never.
'Break The Habit' is the penultimate single before Ari's sophomore EP What Happens When You Fall In Love In Stepford? arrives November 6th, and it occupies a very specific emotional moment: the one immediately after the decision has been made and immediately before its consequences have fully landed. The boats are burning. The retreat is impossible. The only direction is forward. That moment has its own particular energy, neither triumphant nor afraid but something more complex than either, and Ari has caught it on tape with the precision of an artist who knows exactly what she is trying to say and has found exactly the right way to say it.
The visual world she has constructed around this era is as carefully considered as the music itself. Digi-cams, film photos and scrapbooks: the aesthetic language of memory deliberately deployed in the service of departure rather than return. Dollhouses and abandoned spaces. Nostalgia in motion, reaching for an exit. The tension underneath the surface prettiness is architectural rather than incidental, the discomfort built into the visual framework just as the emotional weight is built into the lyric. This is not a clean break story. The Stepford narrative she is working within insists on the grey areas: she fought her way out of the suburbs only to discover the other side was considerably more complicated than the fighting had suggested.
The dance performance video, made in collaboration with director Jean Yuzheng and choreographer Mitzi Trought, brings her back to movement roots she set aside alongside everything else. That reunion of body and voice and creative intention within a single piece of work is its own form of the argument the song is making: the self you abandoned does not disappear, it waits, and when you finally come back for it the return is not just possible but necessary.
The habit being broken is bigger than any specific behaviour. It is the habit of making yourself smaller than you are.
Some habits, once broken, stay broken.
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