On MOSH★PIT, MARIS turns loneliness, horny boredom, insecurity, friendship and the sweaty chaos of her live shows into a theory of pop stardom built around making everyone in the room feel seen. Perfection, she discovered, was getting in the way.
There is an extremely simple rule at a MARIS show.
You have to participate.
You can film.
You can scream.
You can presumably make whatever questionable decisions people make when strobe lights and extremely loud pop music are involved.
MARIS doesn’t particularly care.
But you cannot simply stand there.
“Film the show as much as you want, idgaf about that,” she says. “But make sure u dance and sing in the process.”
This is not really crowd-work strategy.
It’s closer to a worldview.
Because somewhere between the growing crowds, sold-out shows, bigger production ambitions and the release of her new EP MOSH★PIT, MARIS has arrived at an unexpectedly generous definition of what being a pop star is supposed to accomplish.
It’s not about convincing everyone in the room that she’s extraordinary.
It’s about convincing them that they are.
“Through the process of letting go of my deep desire to be perfect, I have discovered my purpose as a popstar.”
Then she explains what that purpose actually is.
“My ultimate goal is to make people feel like they’re the superstar themselves.”
Which, ironically, might be a much more interesting route toward becoming one.
Welcome to the Mosh Pit
From outside, a mosh pit looks mildly insane.
Bodies colliding.
Sweat.
Noise.
Someone inevitably loses a shoe.
But inside the chaos is a surprisingly sophisticated social contract.
You move together.
You give people space.
If someone falls, you help them up.
Strangers temporarily become responsible for one another.
Chaos requires trust.
For MARIS, that makes the mosh pit an ideal metaphor for the emotional world she’s trying to build.
“I constantly crave that feeling, of freedom and catharsis and strobing lights and sweaty bodies and love.”
Especially love.
Not necessarily romantic love.
The stranger version.
“Love in a communal way, where you feel seen and held by strangers.”
MARIS thinks that kind of connection is essential.
“Life is so bleak without it.”
And MOSH★PIT grew partly from realizing that the loneliness she was processing in her personal relationships didn’t need to remain private.
It could become collective.
“I was processing my personal relationships, and feeling so alone in that. It feels really special that the shows and the ethos around them became about sharing this aloneness with the moshpit.”
That’s the paradox at the center of the EP.
A room full of lonely people doesn’t necessarily remain lonely.
Sometimes they start jumping.
“Happiness and grief are best experienced in community.”
Headlining Changed the Job
MARIS says the shift happened when she first got the opportunity to headline.
Suddenly the room felt different.
When you’re supporting another artist, you enter somebody else’s ecosystem.
When the name on the ticket is yours, the atmosphere becomes your responsibility.
That realization changed her.
“Suddenly I felt really responsible for how people felt in the room at my shows.”
She loved it.
Not the control.
The responsibility.
The possibility of deliberately constructing a place where someone might feel happier, freer or less alone for an hour.
“I feel grateful and excited to have the opportunity to create a space where people feel happy and involved and a sense of community.”
And there is an important reciprocity here.
MARIS isn’t standing outside that community distributing catharsis to everyone else.
“It gives me that feeling, too.”
The audience is doing something for her.
The room works both ways.
Sometimes It’s Okay to Be Bored and Horny
Then there’s “Nothing To Do.”
The focus track arrives with the difficult responsibility of introducing listeners to the complete MOSH★PIT universe.
What does it reveal about the project that wasn’t apparent from the earlier singles?
MARIS has an answer.
“That sometimes it’s okay to be bored and horny.”
There you go.
Pop criticism can go home.
But beneath the joke is something important about the record’s personality.
MOSH★PIT isn’t interested in turning every emotion into a profound revelation.
Sometimes you’re grieving.
Sometimes you’re insecure.
Sometimes you’re ecstatic.
Sometimes you’re surrounded by people and still lonely.
And sometimes you are simply bored and horny.
All of those states are allowed into the same room.
That emotional lack of hierarchy is part of what makes MARIS’s songwriting feel diaristic.
Life doesn’t organize itself into tasteful thematic categories.
Why should the EP?
Why Whisper When You Can Build an Arena Chorus?
The strange thing about vulnerability in MARIS’s music is its volume.
Confessional songwriting is often associated with intimacy.
Acoustic guitar.
Close microphone.
Maybe a tasteful amount of reverb.
MARIS would apparently rather put the confession through an enormous sound system.
Why make vulnerable feelings bigger instead of quieter?
“I’m just a loud person honestly.”
Fair enough.
“Always have been.”
Apparently this may be genetic.
“My dad is a radio show host of a hunting and fishing radio show, and you can hear his laugh from a million miles away.”
Suddenly the arena-sized choruses make perfect sense.
For MARIS, emotional honesty doesn’t require shrinking.
Sometimes vulnerability needs spectacle.
Sometimes insecurity wants distortion.
Sometimes loneliness needs a chorus loud enough for 500 strangers to scream it back at you.
Extremely Confident. Extremely Insecure.
MOSH★PIT lives inside contradictions.
MARIS identifies one in particular.
She’s extremely confident.
She loves her community.
She’s also extremely insecure.
And sometimes feels profoundly alone.
“I experience the peaks and the valleys of both so intensely.”
There is something useful about refusing to resolve those opposing states.
Pop culture often encourages a progression where insecurity is something you defeat on the way toward becoming confident.
MARIS doesn’t describe it that neatly.
Both exist.
Sometimes simultaneously.
You can command a stage and still feel lonely afterward.
You can believe deeply in what you’re building and question yourself.
You can be surrounded by a community and still experience isolation.
The mosh pit works as a metaphor precisely because it doesn’t eliminate chaos.
It gives chaos somewhere to go.
The Bigger It Gets, the More Friends She Wants to Bring
MARIS’s aesthetic has a strong DIY quality.
Songs.
Social media.
Clothes.
Visuals.
Live shows.
There’s a sense that the edges aren’t supposed to become completely smooth.
But MARIS also has absolutely no interest in romanticizing small budgets forever.
Messiness and spontaneity are important.
But also:
Give her money.
“I can’t wait to really have the budget to make an unbelievable show full of spectacle and creativity.”
This is where the MARIS version of DIY gets interesting.
Growth doesn’t necessarily mean replacing the people who built the project with a distant professional apparatus.
It can mean giving those people more resources to make increasingly ridiculous things.
Her tour manager and photographer Kylie Rebecca is building a lighting rig for the tour with her dad.
Musical director and drummer Julian “Tiger” Lewis has meticulously constructed the live show.
Her former roommate and “current sweet darling friend” Olivia is a stylist and seamstress who has tailored and created clothes for MARIS to wear.
This isn’t DIY as aesthetic branding.
It’s friends making shit together.
“I can’t wait to continue growing my production and project and get to bring on more of my incredible and talented friends!”
Arena ambition doesn’t have to eliminate intimacy.
Maybe it just means your friends eventually get bigger toys.
Gaga. Freddie. Fantasy.
MARIS isn’t shy about scale.
Her music pulls from heartland rock, glam-pop and contemporary pop, while comparisons to Lady Gaga and Freddie Mercury have entered the conversation around her work.
Her reaction is not detached coolness.
“The fantasy!”
Exactly.
She grew up admiring both.
The comparisons feel surreal precisely because they represent the kind of artist she hopes to become.
What she takes from performers like Gaga and Mercury isn’t merely vocal technique or songwriting.
It’s world-building.
“The ability to craft incredible music and then expand on the aesthetic and entire world surrounding a song and a persona is a craft.”
Song as starting point.
Clothes.
Lighting.
Character.
Gesture.
Stage.
Audience.
Mythology.
Pop becomes architecture.
“They’re masters of it.”
MARIS isn’t pretending she’s already reached that scale.
“I can only hope to achieve such heights in my career.”
But the direction is clear.
“I’ll always be striving to be as legendary and as iconic as Freddie and Gaga, amongst other legends.”
Modest goals.
Turns Out Sold-Out Shows Are Fun
The audience appears to be growing alongside the ambition.
MARIS sold out her first Mercury Lounge date in New York during presale.
So another was added.
That sold out too.
Chicago and Los Angeles followed with sold-out dates.
Does this cause some enormous existential recalibration of what she thinks her career can become?
Not exactly.
“I just feel excited that the shows are guaranteed to be rowdy and insane.”
There is also relief.
MARIS describes herself as a small-business owner and someone who has worked “a million shitty jobs.”
So yes, seeing tickets move matters materially.
Hard work producing an actual return is exciting.
But her first thought about a sold-out room is wonderfully practical:
It’s going to be fun as hell.
“The shows are already gonna be packed and fun as hell!!”
The metric matters because of what it produces physically.
Bodies.
Energy.
Noise.
The mosh pit gets bigger.
Respect, Silliness and Grace
So what does MARIS actually want those people to do for each other?
Not for her.
Each other.
Three things.
“Respect and silliness and grace.”
That’s essentially the MOSH★PIT constitution.
Respect because communal freedom collapses if people don’t care about one another.
Grace because everybody entering the room is carrying something you probably don’t know about.
And silliness because none of this works if everyone is terrified of looking stupid.
“We live in such an isolated time.”
That’s the enemy underneath much of the EP.
Isolation.
The screen.
Individual experience packaged and consumed alone.
MARIS isn’t anti-phone.
Again:
Film the show.
She doesn’t care.
The problem isn’t documentation.
It’s forgetting to participate in the thing you’re documenting.
Make the video.
But dance while you’re making it.
Scream badly.
Talk to somebody.
Sweat.
Be physically present in your own memory.
Perfection Was Ruining the Party
The most significant change MARIS describes isn’t musical.
It’s psychological.
She wanted to be perfect.
Pop encourages that fantasy.
Perfect image.
Perfect performance.
Perfect styling.
Perfect rollout.
Perfect content.
Perfect pop star.
But the harder MARIS tried to move toward that ideal, the further she got from what actually connected with people.
So she started letting it go.
“I’m not supposed to be super polished and perfect, at least not at this stage in my artistry.”
Instead:
Fun.
Lighthearted.
Human.
“I make people feel the best when I focus on being fun and lighthearted and human.”
That realization redirected the entire purpose of performing.
If MARIS presents herself as impossibly polished, the audience can admire her.
If she presents herself as fully human, maybe the audience can recognize themselves.
That’s a different exchange.
Less worship.
More participation.
Less:
Look at me.
More:
Come in.
Everybody Gets to Be the Superstar
This is where MOSH★PIT becomes more interesting than its title’s promise of chaos.
The project isn’t actually about losing yourself.
It’s about becoming less embarrassed to be yourself.
Loud.
Insecure.
Horny.
Grieving.
Confident.
Lonely.
Ridiculous.
Emotional.
Sweaty.
Happy.
Sometimes all within the same song.
MARIS isn’t constructing the mosh pit as a place where those contradictions disappear.
She’s constructing it as a place where nobody has to solve them before they’re allowed inside.
And creating that permission for other people has apparently given some of it back to her.
“Through the process of letting go of my deep desire to be perfect, I have discovered my purpose as a popstar.”
That purpose isn’t perfection.
It isn’t distance.
It isn’t convincing the audience that the person under the spotlight belongs to a more glamorous species.
It’s giving the spotlight away.
“My ultimate goal is to make people feel like they’re the superstar themselves.”
Maybe that’s the real fantasy.
Not that everybody gets to become famous.
That for one sweaty, ridiculous, strobe-lit night, everybody gets to feel enormous.
In Conversation With MARIS
MOSH★PIT takes the energy of your live shows and turns it into a full body of work. When did you realize that the community forming around your performances wasn’t simply an audience, but something you wanted to build an entire EP around?
As soon as I had the opportunity to headline, it really changed my life. Suddenly I felt really responsible for how people felt in the room at my shows, and I love it. I feel grateful and excited to have the opportunity to create a space where people feel happy and involved and a sense of community. It gives me that feeling, too.
A mosh pit can look chaotic from the outside, but there’s also an unspoken sense of trust and collective release happening inside it. What made that the perfect metaphor for where you are emotionally and creatively right now?
I think I constantly crave that feeling, of freedom and catharsis and strobing lights and sweaty bodies and love. Love in a communal way, where you feel seen and held by strangers. That kind of love is really important, and I think life is so bleak without it. A lot of this EP was me processing my personal relationships, and feeling so alone in that. It feels really special that the shows and the ethos around them became about sharing this aloneness with the moshpit. Happiness and grief are best experienced in community.
“Nothing To Do” is the focus track introducing people to the complete project. What does that song reveal about MOSH★PIT that perhaps wasn’t obvious from the singles leading up to the EP?
That sometimes it’s okay to be bored and horny.
The record combines diaristic songwriting with huge, almost arena-sized pop production. When you’re writing about something deeply vulnerable, what makes you want to make the emotion bigger rather than quieter?
I’m just a loud person honestly. Always have been, my dad is a radio show host of a hunting and fishing radio show, and you can hear his laugh from a million miles away.
You describe MOSH★PIT as embracing the chaos and contradictions of young adulthood. What contradiction within yourself did you find yourself returning to most while writing these songs?
That I’m extremely confident and I love my community, and that I’m also extremely insecure and feel so alone sometimes. I experience the peaks and the valleys of both so intensely.
There’s a playful DIY quality running through your music, visuals and social presence, even as your shows and ambitions become considerably larger. As MARIS grows, how important is it to preserve some of the messiness and spontaneity that made the project exciting in the first place?
Very important, but also I can’t wait to really have the budget to make an unbelievable show full of spectacle and creativity. As my budget has grown already, it’s been really fun to incorporate some ideas from Kylie Rebecca, who is my tour manager and photographer on tour. She’s building a lighting rig for the tour with her dad, it’s pretty amazing. My MD and drummer Julian “Tiger” Lewis has meticulously created the show of our dreams. My former roommate and current sweet darling friend Olivia is an incredible stylist and seamstress and she tailored and created a bunch of clothes for me to wear. I can’t wait to continue growing my production and project and get to bring on more of my incredible and talented friends!
Your music pulls together heartland rock, glam-pop and contemporary pop, while artists as different as Lady Gaga and Freddie Mercury have been invoked in conversations around your work. What have you learned from performers who understand that pop music can be as much about creating a world as writing a song?
The fantasy! It’s always such an insane feeling to be compared to them, because I’ve looked up to them both forever. The ability to craft incredible music and then expand on the aesthetic and entire world surrounding a song and a persona is a craft. They’re masters of it. I can only hope to achieve such heights in my career, I’ll always be striving to be as legendary and as iconic as Freddie and Gaga, amongst other legends.
Your New York shows sold out during presale, with a second Mercury Lounge date added and selling out as well, alongside sold-out dates in Chicago and Los Angeles. Does seeing that demand change the scale of what you imagine MARIS becoming, or are you careful not to let numbers interfere with the community you’re building?
I just feel excited that the shows are guaranteed to be rowdy and insane. I obviously am a small business owner, and I’ve worked a million shitty jobs, so it’s exciting to see my hard work start to pay off, but I mostly feel relief in that the shows are already gonna be packed and fun as hell!!
You’ve said that at a MARIS show, people are going to jump, dance and participate “whether or not” they want to. Beneath the humor, there seems to be a genuine philosophy about breaking down the barrier between performer and audience. What do you want people to give to each other—not just to you—when they enter that room?
I want them to give each other respect and silliness and grace. We live in such an isolated time, so much of our life is through a screen. Film the show as much as you want, idgaf about that, but make sure u dance and sing in the process.
MOSH★PIT is built around giving people permission to be loud, emotional, messy and completely themselves. Has creating that kind of freedom for your audience made it easier for you to become more unapologetic about who you are?
Absolutely. Through the process of letting go of my deep desire to be perfect, I have discovered my purpose as a popstar. I’m not supposed to be super polished and perfect, at least not at this stage in my artistry. I make people feel the best when I focus on being fun and lighthearted and human. This redirection of my mindset has helped me realize that my ultimate goal is to make people feel like they’re the superstar themselves, less like I’m so perfect and in that I have enjoyed performing so much more.
