(untitled) halo’s “aimee lou wood freestyle” is a jerk-inflected snapshot of life in LA

A recent guest of the Talkhouse podcast, avant-garde composer William Basinski spoke out about completing his seminal ambient album The Disintegration Loops, stating: “My work had to collapse in front of me for anyone to get what I’d been working on for 20 years.” The Disintegration Loops, briefly defined, was a project that hazarded its claim to the art of degradation.

Basinski, in his 40s and in debt, had recovered some recordings he’d set to magnetic tape decades earlier. He also realised, as he attempted to archive the sound digitally, that the tape was physically breaking down before his eyes. He would go on to document the sound of collapse through four LPs of droning loops that riff on single melodic lines. As the tape plays, the tape degrades. So does the sound itself, perhaps imperceptibly, at first, thanks to the oppressive repetition, but assuredly. On the morning of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, just six weeks after he discovered the old tapes, Basinski finished the recording. He sat on his roof and played the disintegration loops.

For (untitled) halo’s drummer and producer Jay Are, repetition, and therefore collapse, is a methodology as much as anything else. He brings up Basinski’s Disintegration Loops when speaking about the band’s new single: the hazy, jerk-inflected “aimee lou wood freestyle.” It serves as the opening track on their forthcoming self-titled debut LP, out 6 November via Dirty Hit. “Whenever you hear something being repeated so many times, it gives it a different texture,” Are says, also admitting that he hasn’t been wearing earplugs lately. “So there's that level of deterioration physically,” he rejoinders.

untitled (halo) – composed of Are, Ariana Mamnoon, Jack Dione, and Nicholas Noneman – have released two EPs since their first single in 2023, the urika’s bedroom-produced “limewire”. Still, they’ve been quiet for the past two years, only releasing a single track together. In the time between, they’ve been playing their songs live, supporting artists including bar italia, The Hellp, Alison’s Halo, and DIIV.

Dione penned the title “aimee lou wood freestyle” after the English actress who famously starred in Season 3 of The White Lotus, a show he had been watching a lot of in the spring of 2025. Around this premiere period, March to be exact, the group thus recorded the single. It is a frenetic announcement of the quartet’s arrival, and the thesis of a project so steeped in an ethos of collaboration, but also one of disintegration. “Originally, it was just gonna be a rap song, which a lot of it still is,” Mamnoon reveals. Born out of a jerk beat Dione had been experimenting with, “We were just listening to a lot of xaviersobased and fakemink at the time,” he says. “Every time all of us would DJ, we would always play ‘LV Sandals’.”

For Are, spinning the EsDeeKid track unlocked a new looping method: “It’s the same sample repeating, but then it switches up just ever so slightly.” While untitled (halo)’s loops don’t quite disintegrate, they do break down. The delight is in what breaks through. Take the first vocal, Mamnoon’s dream cadence antidote to the raps Dione is about to lay down. Her vocals are the song’s guiding force, recorded after Are’s beat, Noneman’s studio wizardry, and Dione’s verse – Mamnoon lilts, “tear it all apart,” before anything else. “It's really a piece of all of us, which is really cool,” she says.

This fragmentation is as much a reflection of the members’ different strengths as it is the sound of four young people, together, metabolising an atomisation so embedded in the world they’ve grown up in. They have a shared taste in music, film, and art, but also share a geographic upbringing in Southern California. “I feel like the way that we make music is always going to be a complete reaction to our lives, emotions and surroundings,” Dione says. “Especially with LA, specifically, as a backdrop, we interpret that in such a strange way. It just kind of makes sense that it sounds disjointed and upset and angsty.” A real-time disintegration, a la Basinski, perhaps, but also a testament to the bond they share.

They still attest to how much they've grown just from working together. “Learning from each other's strengths has been one of the most valuable things that I think I've ever experienced,” says Noneman, who formally joined the band after the recording of their debut album. “I haven't encountered something like this, it's truly beautiful.” “We’re basically a team,” Ari adds. “In all ways.”

“aimee lou wood freestyle”, even as it begins to disintegrate before our ears, is perhaps proof enough that even as everything is breaking down, simply together is the best thing we can be. Maybe in 20 years, an (untitled) halo record will be pushed to the point of collapse, but for now, the band is thrilled to be getting started.