On the Rise
untitled (halo)

After years of a music discovery culture so centred on algorithms and synthetic popularity, it’s refreshing to watch a band come up the good old fashioned way. That’s certainly the case with Dirty Hit’s newest prodigies, the band untitled (halo). Born out of the sunsoaked stretches of suburban Los Angeles, friends-turned-collaborators Ariana Mamnoon, Jack Dione, Jay Are, and Nicholas Noneman are unifying years of solo work and disparate creative adventures under a new banner that explores the dichotomous malaise and community found in California’s endless summers.

All California locals, Mamnoon, Dione, Are, and Noneman bumped into each other through odd jobs, bands, and friends of friends. Mamnoon and Are first met at Los Angeles’s dublab radio, a community-oriented nonprofit that acts as a launch pad for the city’s next-up. Noneman first found Mamnoon at a skate park during COVID, where they linked up over a shared love of skate culture and Alex G. “Fun fact, our early TikTok was an Alex G fan page,” Noneman snickers and admits. “A video of Jack and Jay DJing Alex G went viral,” Mamnoon adds. Dione came in a similar way, having himself floated in and out of previous band projects.

For the quartet, the real nexus was El Prado, a Silverlake bar that, though it wasn’t where they all originally met, ended up being the namesake to one of their first cult hits, “el prado freestyle.” Set to a beat Are made living in a garage in Santa Cruz in 2017, the track both anchored them to L.A.'s grunge legacy and planted the seed that their project could be more than just another basement experiment.

“It didn’t form our friendship, but it was a bar that generations of people in L.A. would always go to. Like, you’ll always meet older people who are like, ‘Damn, El Prado was the spot for us.’ [...] And at the time, people would just come hang out on the sidewalk and linger. It felt very gritty and cool to linger,” Mamnoon says. And so even though the bar wasn’t necessarily the original inception, it was, in many ways, a cultural anchor. As Are and Noneman point out, finding themselves at a local spot like El Prado felt akin to what the punks might have found at CBGBs, especially in the post-COVID era. That feeling has been infectious. Now, Mamnoon says fans at shows all over the world approach her and say they tried El Prado just because of the track.

Initially, collaborating on music was just for fun, as it so often is in L.A. DIY circles. It was a way to begin clawing back community after an intense time of pandemic separation. “Pretty early on, though, even though it was just for funsies, we realised it was actually good enough to try,” Mamnoon explains. They’d all had projects come and go before. Soon, they knew untitled (halo) was different. “People really liked it. Our friends liked it. And they weren’t just saying that to be polite,” she says. “So we were like, ‘Why not?’ It’s really special to start something with friends and then try to make it your career. Which we are.”

Indeed, untitled (halo)’s work feels clearly born out of the spirit of intense, thoughtful, and generative collaboration. The band members throw out references like Ed Rauscha — the artist whose untitled paintings helped inspire their name — and Dostoyevsky at whim, talking amongst themselves about the lineage of art they see their work both drawing from and contributing to. Noneman, for example, described thinking with Are long and hard about unconventional song structures, wanting to work on a project that didn’t just make cool songs but made ones that were different, refreshing, and alive.

With their forthcoming self-titled debut record, the group has clearly achieved that mission. The group worked with L.A.-based urika’s bedroom, a key figure of its experimental pop scene, to forge their early sonic identity; particularly on 2024 EP headbanger, and whose influence Noneman says has been pivotal to their current work.

Their new record builds on those experimental beginnings and matures them, pulling as much from shoegaze (see “easy rider”) as it does hyperpop (see “sex”), using a fusion of influences only a post-Internet band could have found to create a sound that feels both warmly lived-in and surprisingly new. untitled (halo) is music made for driving around in the vast unknown, as the chorus of chants on the second verse of “easy rider” invites, the kind of thing that California does best.

Of course, coming up at a time that is seeing popularity arrive for groups like Mackeeper, Chanel Beads, and Brat Star, the sound is contextualisable in a music landscape that’s hungry for these left-field tinges. It’s a rising tide, and untitled (halo) are beckoning as the Golden State scene’s new unofficial ambassadors of that movement.