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Aries has been on YouTube for years. He's a serious YouTuber and also a touring artist who fills multi-thousand-seat venues across the US, making artsy, anti-pop music, with recent collaborations from brakence and underscores. I'm a huge fan. I think two or three years ago, he was my number one artist on Spotify Wrapped, which is funny because I think Slayyyter was my number one a long time before that, too, on one of her songs. Two in a row.

Here's the thing about Aries. There isn't a ton of interesting marketing happening across every platform he's on. YouTube is where he shines. He's got 207 videos on the channel going back roughly nine years, and scrolling through them from oldest to newest is basically a timeline of how he built this whole thing.

The oldest videos on the channel are speedrun breakdowns, things like how Kendrick's "DNA" was made in two minutes, how Future's "Mask Off" was made, and "Can You Make a Beat in 60 Seconds." Low effort, low aura, low stakes.

That trajectory is close to identical to another high-aura artist who started as a YouTuber first, Quadeca. Very similar vibe, very similar path.

I bring this up because one of the things I hear a lot on consulting calls and in the questions on this channel is the idea that if you don't start out high aura, you can never become high aura. That is the exact opposite of what happened here. Aries went from low-aura beat breakdowns to one of the more artsy, mysterious rollouts happening right now.

Aries put out a recap video for the era around his new record, Glass Jaw. It's Aries sitting with his audience in what looks like a shop, everyone wearing masks tied to a character he built for this era, Hijinx. He talks about the album. It's a little weird, a little mysterious, and that reads as intentional.

In the clip, he gets into finishing the record, using an extended metaphor about painting an entire wall without knowing what would end up on it, and only stepping back once it was done. He also talks about the album title itself, tying the idea of a glass jaw, something built to break but worn anyway, to imperfection and identity. I can't verify how much of that framing lands without watching the full video yourself, since a lot of the tone here comes from the visuals and the room, not just what's said.

The thumbnail is just him talking, and the title is "THERE IS NO CURE FOR A GLASS JAW," A title that vague only works because his fans are locked in enough to click on it anyway. Earlier in his career, his titles were a lot more clickbaity, closer to MrBeast's style. As an artist's fans get more locked in, the artist can get away with vaguer, more artistic titles and still pull the click.

Rewind to the start of this rollout, and the approach looks completely different. The era kicks off with a 37-second video called "Must Warn Others," which drops right as he introduces the Hijinx mask.