The cover tells you everything before the music starts. Andura sits on NJ Transit, face turned toward the window, expression pensive and melancholic. The posture reads as departure, not arrival. This is someone leaving—the soft blur of platform lights receding, the particular stillness of a person who has already said goodbye. The commuter train as threshold space, carrying someone away from what was toward whatever comes next.
Airing Out the Aries arrives from a turbulent moment. Two relationships, both ending badly, both with people born under the same sign. The EP does not seek sympathy or understanding—it seeks closure. Each song runs over five minutes; the opener approaches seven. These are not singles designed for streaming playlists. They are extended statements, room enough for a complete emotional arc. The title works as wordplay—"airing out" grievances about "the Aries," plural. Two birds, one stone.
There is precedent for this kind of long-form emotional processing in contemporary R&B. Frank Ocean's "Pyramids" runs nearly ten minutes, moving through ancient Egypt to modern strip clubs, a journey that Grammy.com described as requiring its runtime to hold all its contradictions.1 SZA's extended cuts on SOS give heartbreak room to breathe, to circle back, to arrive at something like resolution. Andura works in this tradition—the understanding that some feelings cannot be compressed into three-minute radio edits.
"I brought you up to the whole world. They said it's not even close, girl. How much is your love worth? It's none."
The first track, "I Brought You Up," opens with a soul warmth that belies what's coming. The production is built on vocal stems from Komorembi Audio's Tapestries sample pack, a collection of RnB and lofi soul textures created by a team including S. Lyre, MidAir!, Patrick Rimterakul, Jordan Booth, and Niklas Shahly.2 At 92 BPM in E-flat major, the song moves at the pace of conversation—unhurried, careful, working something out.
What makes the track structurally remarkable is how its form mirrors its emotional content. The song establishes a rigid motif: the phrase "I brought you up" returns again and again, anchoring verse after verse before cycling back to the chorus. The hook plays on the phrase's double meaning—I brought you up as in "I mentioned you," but also "I spoke well of you." Andura has taken the situation to everyone—mother, father, friends, exes, even ChatGPT. The verdict is unanimous. This is not ranting; it is auditing. Testimony gathered, accounts cross-referenced, objectivity sought from artificial intelligence.
The approach echoes Drake's "Polar Opposites" from For All The Dogs, where Drake suggests his ex "let your sister be the voice of reason"—an acknowledgment that sometimes the people closest to a situation see it most clearly.3 In "I Brought You Up," Andura takes this further: he has consulted everyone, and they have all reached the same conclusion.
But the structure does something else. As the song progresses, the composure begins to crack. The neat pattern holds—"I brought you up" to your sister, to your ex—but each iteration goes deeper. The questions become more pointed. The forensic approach starts yielding answers.
By the song's final third, the carefully maintained structure can no longer contain what's being said. The criticism becomes unflinching: trauma addressed directly, the feeling of being undervalued, the parallel drawn to her father walking out. The lines land harder because the form has trained us to expect restraint.
And then there's the voice. The sample plays consistently throughout—that warm, looping soul texture never wavers. But Andura's vocal performance tells a different story. What begins with clarity and control gradually diminishes. By the end, he's nearly whispering. The composure that held the structure together has eroded. When "I brought you up" returns for the final time, it carries the weight of the entire journey: the auditing, the questioning, the breaking. The phrase hasn't changed. Everything around it has.
The track is rated G—disappointment and longing rendered without profanity, the quiet ache of unanswered questions.
"Gon' need more than 2 Heinekens. My love 4 you is retiring. Nothing with you has been 1-to-1. Adding that up, thinking you'd still be a dime, a 10?"
The second track announces itself differently. "EUGENECONRRR"—the title a reference to a spam account username—signals a shift in register. Where the first track sought understanding, the second demands accountability. The content rating jumps to R.
The song unfolds in three distinct movements, each with its own sonic and lyrical identity. The first movement rides Tainy's melodic loop from Splice—the same synth line that underpins Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez's "DAKITI." That loop has its own origin story: according to Rolling Stone, Tainy created the "keening, waterlogged beat" at least three years before its release, but no one wanted it. When he released a sample pack on Splice during quarantine, Jhay Cortez discovered it and began tinkering, eventually bringing in Bad Bunny and Mora.4 The result became one of reggaeton's biggest crossover hits, a "slow-burning, futuristic" blend of house and reggaeton.
Andura borrows the synth melody not to make a reggaeton song, but to channel its confident, unapologetic energy. The DAKITI synth combines with piano to create something closer to a trap beat—controlled confrontation set to a head-nodding rhythm. Lyrically, this first movement deals in surface-level jabs: the clever wordplay of "Gon' need more than 2 Heinekens / My love 4 you is retiring / Nothing with you has been 1-to-1 / Adding that up, thinking you'd still be a dime, a 10?" Numbers become weapons. The bars mention his school, how long they've been together, personal details deployed as little jabs—pointed but measured.
There's a strange dynamic being weaponized here. These details come from her—she told him all the unflattering things about the person she left him for. The weirdness of that exchange becomes ammunition. Every flaw she confided gets turned back into a lyric.
Then comes the turn. At "I put her in some Lulu, so I had to switch to Alo," the production shifts dramatically. The piano drops out. Wondagurl's melody enters alongside the DAKITI synth, and the effect is cinematic—theatrical, even. The Canadian producer—born Ebony Naomi Oshunrinde—started making beats at age nine and won Toronto's Battle of The Beat Makers at sixteen.5 She became a protégé of Boi-1da, produced Travis Scott's first Top 40 hit "Antidote," and in 2021 became the first Black Canadian woman to win the Juno Award for Producer of the Year. Her contribution here scores the most confrontational section of the EP.
The second movement unleashes a villain persona. The jabs become direct hits: calling out where he works—or doesn't—his financial situation, the lifestyle gap. "I was in the Ritz, baby, in the Ritz." But there's self-awareness too: "I'm so shallow, baby." Andura accepts the accusation rather than deflecting it. The acknowledgment continues: "Hate saying that word"—the word bitch—"but love itself is a curse." Too much value placed in something that keeps failing.
The third movement begins at "JC"—and the letters don't stand for initials. They stand for Jesus Christ. The DAKITI synth and Wondagurl's melody fall away. Only the piano remains—the same Origin Sound keys from Andura's earlier track "Buena Vista"—and the song transforms into a ballad. This is the deepest cut, aimed not at the relationship but at its foundation. Politics enter explicitly: the company kept, the values revealed, the rallies attended. The religious critique follows naturally: performative faith, Bible study without comprehension, cruelty dressed in Sunday clothes. "Telling me to kill myself, what if I said okay?" The line exposes the full contradiction of their morality—people who attend Bible study, who claim faith, who paint themselves as righteous, telling someone to end their life. The hypocrisy is the point.
The contrast between the two tracks is the point. Different subjects demanded different sonic languages. The first track's soul textures suit introspection, the work of sitting with feelings and trying to understand them. The second track's escalating production—trap to cinematic to stripped-down ballad—matches the escalating indictment. Komorembi's warm vocal stems for processing; Tainy and Wondagurl's contemporary edge for confrontation; Origin Sound's piano for the final verdict.
This is the logic of the two-track EP pushed to its limit. There is no filler here, no transitional interlude, no ambient palette cleanser. Just two complete statements, back to back, totaling eleven minutes of closure.
By the final moments, the EP has traveled a significant distance—from seeking answers to delivering verdicts, from acoustic soul to trap-inflected confrontation to piano ballad, from G-rated longing to R-rated reckoning. The commuter on the cover makes sense now. Andura has said everything that needed to be said. The train is moving. The platform is already behind.
Airing Out the Aries is available on the artist's [Music page](/music/andura/albums/airing-out-the-aries).