In late 2025, Ari Abdul began to recognize a pattern. She had developed habits that were numbing her ability to feel anything. She had just scrapped an album she’d been working on for a year and started digging deeper. As a new body of work began to take shape, Abdul noticed a theme bubbling up: the songs were confronting the ugly, self-destructive parts of herself and unlocking emotions she had been running away from. “I was the queen of avoidance,” she admits. “I was filling the emptiness.”
Enter THE VOID (out November 13 via Slumbo Labs/RCA Records), Abdul’s debut album. Dark, transgressive and visceral, THE VOID tackles the loneliness and emptiness she had been avoiding head-on through some of her most raw and personal lyrics yet.
“For the first time ever, with this project, I’m opening up and going through so much self-discovery,” she explains. “I feel like my frontal lobe is slowly forming.” Along with this self-discovery, THE VOID breaks the fourth wall and makes the listener part of this loop, so the album isn’t finished until someone is there to hear it.
Written and recorded in LA, THE VOID was co-produced by Stint (Demi Lovato, Sabrina Claudio) and Ella Boh. Co-writing credits include Trey Campbell (Dua Lipa, keshi), Emma Rosen (mgk, Zoe Wees) and Ilsey (Mark Ronson, The 1975),and the album was created in Stint’s studio and a writing camp in Frogtown.
“I felt comfortable enough in that room to write or say or just throw any dark concept or any intrusive thought in my mind [out there] and they would be receptive,” Abdul says.
The song that helped kick off the project was written while attempting a dry January. Partying and heavy drinking had become a toxic part of Abdul’s life, and in no longer wanting to use it as a means to escape, she took a break. She penned “DOPESICK,” a song meant to have an open-ended interpretation for her listeners.
“It sounds like this toxic love song, but actually it’s about substance abuse and doing things that are killing you slowly,” she explains.
Early singles “ENAMORED” and “SEDUCTIVE” lean much more into how desire has fed her emptiness. Lead single “ENAMORED” was penned during a moment where Abdul was forced to sit with her own feelings of loneliness while her girlfriend was away. Acknowledging the codependent nature of their relationship she says, “the best way I could describe it is when you have a great night out with friends, and then you get back home on your own and you’re consumed by this feeling of ‘Oh wait I’m alone again.”
“SEDUCTIVE” is the other side of the coin, one thirsting for validation. “It romanticizes the feeling of making yourself whatever someone else wants because it gives you that validation that you almost forget who you are,” she says.
Abdul wanted the entire project to feel seductive and slightly dangerous, music that carries the same intoxicating pull as the bad habits and escapist pleasures she’s writing about. “I purposely wanted to release [singles] that fit in the same soundscape that this project is in. I wanted it to be like a mixtape for strippers.”
Along with the sultriness is a thread of nostalgia. Abdul came of age in Brooklyn in the early millennium with immigrant parents who raised their kids on Latin pop and hip-hop. Between her dad’s love of the classics and her brothers’ penchant for more underground rap, her deep connection to the New York-born genre was inevitable.
“I’m morphing these sad melodies and my old sound with these old school hip hop influences,” she explains. On the aptly titled “HOME,” Abdul includes field recordings of subways, while other songs incorporate drum fills, classic rap-inspired flows and MC-style record scratches.
A different core memory from Abdul’s childhood also left a huge mark on THE VOID. She had a near-death experience as a kid in a pool, and the duality of water figures heavily into the visual world of this project. “Water can be cleansing but can also be dangerous,” she says. On the album cover, she’s pictured in a bath tub. The visual world matches the sonic world well: bleak and desolate with an emphasis on liminal spaces. She evokes some of her favorite films in building out this world: Requiem for a Dream, Taxi Driver, Drive, Mysterious Skin.
“I wanted this record to feel really lonely,” she says, noting how the characters in those movies are just as lost and yearning as she has found herself in the past.
Prior to her breakthrough with her 2022 debut single “BABYDOLL,” Abdul didn’t have a plan or a purpose. Music gave her that. Since that song dropped, she has released two EPs, made her live debut at Lollapalooza and toured with Nessa Barrett. Along the way, the girl who grew up a Tumblr fangirl has founded a community of her own, connecting with an ever-growing audience who feel the same way she does.
“This project feels so much like me, and it feels so real to me,” she says. “I feel like it’s a perfect reflection of what I’ve always wanted to say.”
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