If you took the punch and oratory power of a rapper, slowed it down, dipped it in honey and bathed it in electronic wizardry, you would have Aaricia’s sound.
The 21-year-old singer/songwriter born and raised in Montreal cites a poetry class as changing her songwriting game. Her lyrics are powerful and she plays with words like a puppet master using them in unpredictable ways to rhyme, creating slow and sexy melodies. The poetic structure of her lyrics, and each word have to be perfect.
Aaricia (pronounced a-REE-ci-a) always knew she wanted to be a singer and taught herself to play the guitar. It was on a fateful day two years ago while playing that guitar in the park that she ran into Sebastian Navarro from high school.
“I was kind of a lost soul at that time. I played him a song about my ex and afterwards he said, ‘Wow, he really hurt you’”. A few weeks later she ran into him again at a bus stop and he invited her to a party where she met her current producer Max-Antoine Gendron of Ghost Club Records. “If I had taken that bus, everything would be different. I believe it was meant to be.”
Now that trio, along with Aaricia’s father Stephane Gagnon her executive producer, are creating music that is getting downloaded hundreds of thousands of times across North America and Europe. Music runs in the family. Aaricia’s mother Concetta Malorni used to work for Nick Carbone who helped discover Nuance, Les BB and Mitsou in the late 80’s.
Aaricia looks so much like Lady Gaga that on a recent trip to Miami, she kept getting stopped in the street. “I don’t see it”, she says. “I guess it’s because we are both Italian and not real blondes.” Inspired by Khaleesi from the Game of Thrones books she is currently reading, Aaricia dyed her hair platinum.
When she walks down the street she has a sexy swagger that gets the attention of those around her. Aaricia knows how to work the camera as I witnessed while photographing her. Her moves are like a smooth dance that she owns.
Onstage at the recent Ghost Club Records label party, she used smiles sparingly to garner whistles from the crowd. While her black suede boots were thigh high, she wore an oversized yellow t-shirt with an illustration of McDonald’s fries on the breast pocket. She worked the crowd swaying, taunting the audience, accompanied by Max and GrandBuda who kicked up sick beats.
The themes of her recent album Figures are the games people play, lust and ego. Her collaboration All Night with GrandBuda is a seductive highlight of the album, but it is Spin that is stuck in my mind. Aaricia’s voice is as addictive as those McDonalds’s fries.
Be sure to also check out Losing You from her first album The Ruler.
“That’s the song that no matter when I sing it in the future, I will always feel it. When I recorded it, we got it right in one take. When I opened my eyes, it was like I came out of a trance.”
Download her music on iTunes, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, YouTube, Sound Camp, Deezer and Spotify here. Get ready to move.