ARIANE X - BETTER
Press release by David Stubbs

“I thought - you only have one life,” says Ariane X, though she has packed a great deal into hers thus far - stand-up comedian, scriptwriter, campaigner, author, now pop musician, resuming a career she first took up in her teens. 

"When I first tried to become a pop star there were no successful solo female Asian artists, and I got disheartened,” she says. “There was no MIA, no Charli XCX, no Bat for Lashes, so it all felt impossible. I did vocal and piano sessions for Duran Duran, my favourite band, and got lots of regular paid work singing and playing piano in hotels and bars – but deep down, I assumed it was unrealistic to try and make it as a solo artist.”

In fact, it may well have been Ariane who was being unrealistic. Having a degree in music production, she approached Warners with her songs and received extremely encouraging feedback. However, she was hampered by a sense of low self-esteem, the result of an extremely abusive childhood, the grim details of which serve as a dark backcloth to her brilliant, sparkling debut album Better, a cycle of love songs dedicated to the light of her life, her daughter. Assuming Warners were simply “being nice”, she gave up.

Instead, Ariane invested her creative energies into writing jokes and scripts for shows such as My Family, Two Pints of Lager and Countdown, as well as self-help books for Hachette such as Talk Yourself Better,How to Live to 100 and The How of Happy. She attained national fame as she created and launched the Atheist Bus Campaign.

However, as lockdown descended, and with a few words of encouragement from mentor Simon Le Bon, she decided it was time to revisit her first love, pop music – writing, producing and performing her debut entirely by herself at home, “except for the guitar, vocal tuning and mixing and mastering”. 

The reissued Better is pop indeed, with distant reminders of the halcyon, hazily seductive tones of Saint Etienne, or the exquisitely honed but darkly shaded electropop of Dubstar. But it’s not the sort of pop that’s manufactured merely to fill radio space. These are love songs, wrought like twisted party balloons, lush, undulating, delicious, colourful starbursts, rhythms like galloping unicorns. 

However, all of this functions as a sort of anaesthetic for the deep, historical and familial pain expressed in these songs, which Ariane presents unflinchingly, without poetic obfuscation or cryptic evasion. Better is candycoated, blissful but also harrowing. The album oscillates between delirious happiness and themes of abuse, depression, loneliness and domestic violence, albeit in terms comprehensible to a youth – hence their stark clarity.

Simon Le Bon says, “I love this album, made from pure, undiluted mother’s love.”

Ariane says, "Each track on the album is a letter to my daughter Lily. They were written over six years when she was aged 9 to 15. I saw the record as a chance to broach things like my struggles with mental illness and suicidal ideation, and my traumatic childhood. I've always been open with Lily, but it's easier to play her songs about these things than to talk about them directly.”

Opener ‘Heartbeat’ is a sweet slice of countrypolitan pop, with twangy slide guitar and pure, earnest vocals. Ariane professes, “I would die for you in a heartbeat/I would push you out the way of a bomb/I’d explode for you as my heart bleeds/Just as long as you could live on.”

Guardian pop writer Caroline Sullivan says, “Countrypolitan banger Heartbeat uniquely mixes country-urban realness - think Maren Morris transported to East London - and Sabrina Carpenter's way with a gossamer-light vocal.”

Second track ‘Secret Asian’ describes Ariane’s daughter, whose pale features, Ariane sings, mean she is unlikely to face the racism faced by brown people – “spit sprayed in your face/being told to go home to a faraway place.” 

This is sumptuous, seductive pop, achieved by Ariane alone, produced with a mic, a keyboard, an interface and the software Logic Pro X (hence Ariane X, the “X” exemplifying the duality of the album as a whole – a kiss, or a mark, a scar? Both?)

Next comes the rich, instrumental tropicalia of ‘Happy’, in which Ariane contemplates the multiple career futures open to her progeny.

Then the calypso-like ‘Tiny Girl’, which is brilliantly bubbly. Written when Ariane’s daughter was nine, it reflects the joys of mothering a pre-adolescent. 

This is then juxtaposed with the anxiety of ‘I’ll Be There’ - that Ariane’s daughter could end up friendless, loveless, her only assurance her mother’s love.

But the mood, the sentiment shifts with the next track, ‘Demons’, which, it turns out, do not belong in the past tense; demons which can only be held at bay with medication. Scary, very real monsters.  

‘Kaleidoscope’, recolourised by remixer DonQuibeats, sees another phase in the cycle, bursting with a sense of ecstatic peace, in which, thanks to Ariane’s daughter, “nothing aches and nothing hurts”, in contrast to the precipice of a void on which she once stood.

But then, with a bipolar shift, comes ‘Miracle’, in which Ariane demonstrates some of the more nuanced feeling she has towards the idea of religiosity since the days in which she was more militantly atheist. Sure, there is probably no God but there is something of the “sacred and divine” about the way in which providence granted Ariane her daughter.

‘Not Normal’ is fraught just like ‘Demons’; every day is a great battle there is no getting around. 

‘Still Love You’ is cut from the same velvet pop cloth as most of Better, but the register is markedly different, as Ariane stoically endures her daughter’s tantrums, the little girl flailing and kicking at her. Ariane takes this in understanding of the fraught circumstances of her little girl’s upbringing: her parents separated when she was but months old; a health scare when Ariane found herself in A&E with a suspected heart attack (a false alarm) affirming the bond between them.

‘When I Was Your Age’, remixed by DonQuibeats, has a deceptively lush backbeat. In the music video, Ariane stares at the viewer with a fixed, unnerving intensity before starkly describing her own friendless, violent, loveless childhood, after which she had to remake herself from scratch. 

Caroline Sullivan describes Ariane as “a natural rapper”, and ‘Designed to Run’ has shades of Luscious Jackson with its packed rap lyrics - “Cool yet hotheaded, warm yet chilly/Soft yet so spiky, the thorns of Lily” - conveying the mercilessness and helplessness of loving someone who is speeding carelessly through life.

It’s a love which, Ariane tells her daughter on the closer ‘Butterfly’, will endure eternally, unconditionally, “‘til the stars all fade to black.”

Better is an album which embraces a diverse range of styles – pure pop, country, tropicalia, hip-hop, dreampop and rock. It reflects the life experiences of the secular female Asian Londoner who wrote the songs, and feeds off the energies of the area where it was produced, Green Street in East London, where 85% of the population are from minority ethnic backgrounds.

What the songs all have in common are beautiful melodies that circle in your head long after you first hear them.

“I’m really proud of the reissue of this album,” Ariane says. “Being a parent is not a universal topic, let alone my traumatic life, but I think people who like strong melodies will enjoy it. Also, when I am gone, the songs will still be here, and my daughter will always be able to listen to how much I love her.”

Record label: Banoffeesound

Release date: 3rd July 2026