Los Angeles collective untitled (halo) has announced its long-awaited self-titled debut album, arriving November 6 via Dirty Hit. The announcement arrives alongside the album’s lead single, “aimee lou wood freestyle,” accompanied by a self-directed music video that pairs featherlight ballet dancers with slow-motion imagery across a dry lake bed at sunset.
The track grew from the first demo untitled (halo) wrote for the album, coming together organically as each member contributed their own musical language. Nick adds a spiraling synth outro, Ari brings melodic lyrics, Jay supplies the trap-influenced beat, and Jack delivers a punchy rap, with the four distinct approaches converging into a single composition.
Formed by longtime friends Ariana Mamnoon, Jack Dione, Jay Are, and Nicholas Noneman, untitled (halo) emerged partly from a shared feeling that Los Angeles was experiencing a “lack of a scene or music.” Having spent years navigating the city’s DIY community, the members absorbed its overlapping histories before eventually finding one another and forming a collective shaped by those experiences.
Rather than simply searching for the community they felt was missing, the band began creating it themselves. Through self-curated events—including their 40-person group art show This Heaven Knows Bars with Obey—and an ongoing party series hosted at venues throughout Los Angeles, untitled (halo) has built spaces where music, art, and community intersect.
Written over the course of a year at the band’s Glassell Park studio, the debut album explores the construction of memory, identity, and personal mythology. During its creation, the members were confronting heartbreak, turbulent relationships, existential uncertainty, and isolation.
In their own words, they were “emotional people in need of sonic catharsis.”
The studio became an escape for Ari, Jack, Jay, and Nick, giving the group a space to turn those experiences into sound. Each song became a way of marking time and making sense of emotions that were often difficult to articulate, while ultimately reinforcing the idea that life remains in constant motion—even when it feels like we’re repeatedly returning to the same questions.
The band has coined the term “California Melancholia” to describe the subdued emotional current running underneath a place defined by seemingly limitless possibility but capable of producing profound emotional stagnation. Across their self-titled debut, untitled (halo) transforms that tension into something tangible, channeling existential discomfort, longing, and monotony into cathartic music.
“This underlying dread comes from taking note of all the artificiality around you, looking for the seams that make the city real, taking shape in the people you love and trust while the new becomes old and the old becomes new again in an endless cycle of manufacturing and optimizing,” the band explains. “The music we make is a cry that becomes a screenshot, or a captured memory that we existed and felt real in the process of making it.”
Those themes run throughout the album, with each member confronting the difficulty of letting go, the desire to understand experiences that resist explanation, and the realization that some people and moments cannot be held onto forever.
Following the album announcement, untitled (halo) will take its debut into the live setting with a series of European headline performances in September. The run includes stops in Barcelona, London, Paris, Berlin, and more.
The band will then embark on a North American headline tour in November, with performances scheduled in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, and San Francisco, before concluding with a hometown performance in Los Angeles.
With “aimee lou wood freestyle” providing the first glimpse into the project, untitled (halo)‘s debut album promises to translate the contradictions of contemporary Los Angeles—its beauty, artificiality, ambition, isolation, and perpetual reinvention—into a deeply personal portrait of California Melancholia.
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