M 4 T R
INTERVIEWS
Interview with M4TR, Cougar Microbes
I’m aiming for an analog revolution. I’m tired of data porn for self-validation. Obsessing over streaming stats is not good for the soul. Are those people listening to my music? Bots? Am I competing with AI songs? It’s all solipsism, completely unverifiable on a human level. The whole ecosystem has been enshittified.
There’s a new documentary about AI that coined the phrase “apocaloptimism.” Great word. My guilty pleasure is laughing at the absurdity of this planet and the fools running it, and dancing through dystopia anyway.
I’m going to reimagine for a bit longer, at least through summer 2027. Vol. 2 will be a strong sequel, if not stronger than Vol. 1. I’m also saving a couple of singles and extended mixes for the complete collection to close it out.
The Alchemy of Modern Collapse and the Kinetic Pulse of M4TR, Apricot Magazine
Tracing the evolution of M4TR reveals a project that has survived over a hundred live performances and several shifts in lineup across the DC area. Solaris has navigated the distance between intimate cafe sets and massive street festivals with a consistent, unyielding vision of what electronic music should achieve. The project has accumulated over two million streams by speaking directly to the contradictions of being human in a digital cage. Love Is The Revolution specifically proved that the public is starving for songs that explore regret and inaction while the bassline threatens to crack the floor. Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1 is the logical next step in this journey of constant, restless movement.
Everything we build is eventually destined to return to the earth, leaving behind only the vibrations of what once stood. Solaris understands this cycle better than most, documenting the slow decay of the industry with a sense of reverent awe. The track eventually dissolves into a lingering, static heat that suggests the structures are still falling somewhere in the distance. We are left watching the horizon for the next sign of life in the rust. The rhythm is established, the truth is spoken, and the city is finally quiet enough to hear the ghosts.
RGM Introducing – We Interview M4TR, RGM
I’ve studied music theory seriously since dissecting my idols and favorite artists. What interests me most are the harmonic spaces that destabilize the obvious. Parallel major and minor keys sitting side by side. Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes. Chord substitutions that refuse to resolve the way the ear predicts. Synth patches that transport to another dimension. The eighties sounded exotic to me because those harmonies were being used adventurously inside what looked, on the surface, like pop songs. That architectural trick, of pairing the familiar with the strange, is still what I’m writing toward.
I think it’s good to be a victim of your surroundings in that music comes from your own experiences and the universe around you. Not your own head. You don’t write as much as you channel. Pay attention to the wrong surroundings and it affects your art. Your art reflects the scene in which you hang. So choose the right scene.
What I try to do is channel more than invent. You absorb the noise of the particular time and place you happen to be alive in, and you try to compress that noise into something that fits inside four or five minutes. If it’s true and written openly enough, someone else will say “I relate to that” and make it their own. If you succeed, you’ve handed someone a bottle with an experience sealed inside.
I’ve left almost all social media intentionally years ago. X and Facebook were easy years ago and after the last studio album was released in June 2025, I left Instagram. I hate the way these platforms make you feel. But I do dabble in Substack a bit as it feels a bit different. I’ve got three songs that talk about the danger of tech and/or narcissism – Monkey God, Death By Selfie and Kill The Self. I think we have to acknowledge that these platforms may have been a net negative in society and brought out the worst in our politics and damaged our mental health. Especially Gen Z. And they’re just going to get worse with AI influencers, AI comments and deep fakes.
I’m actually hoping for an analog revolution and I’m seeing signs of it. Vinyl has been coming back but also now CDs. People want artifacts from a time before social media and three companies controlling music distribution. Chicago, for example, is littered with flyers for songwriters, bands, comedians, magicians, thespians in every coffee shop, vinyl store and rehearsal studio. Very old school and intentional. That’s the world I want to live in IRL.
REVIEWS
REIMAGINATION: THE REMIXES, VOL. 1
M4TR — Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1 (Interview), Dulaxi
Led by songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and sound engineer AJ Solaris, M4TR (Music 4 The Revolution) is a Washington, D.C.-based future wave art-pop project known for blending new wave, synthpop, funk, and disco into what the band describes as “good times for the end times.” Since forming in 2016, M4TR has built a reputation for emotionally charged, socially conscious music that explores themes of modern collapse, cosmic rebirth, obsession, love, and activism through irresistible grooves and sharp commentary. The project has accumulated over 2.7 million streams across 4,000+ playlists in 150 countries, while performing more than 100 shows across the DC area at venues including Jammin Java, Songbyrd Café, Pearl Street Warehouse, and The Renegade.
The critically acclaimed 2025 album “Love Is The Revolution” surpassed one million streams and became M4TR’s most celebrated body of work to date, while previous releases like the “No Tomorrow EP” earned recognition including a Wammie Award nomination for Best Electronic Album. Now entering a bold new era, M4TR recently released “Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1”, a 10-track, 48-minute remix collection that reimagines songs from “Love Is The Revolution” through collaborations with Grammy-winning producer Philip Larsen and Billboard chart-topping remixer Mr. Mig.
I prefer exotic chord structures and melodies that feel unusual. Parallel major and minor keys, Mixolydian, Phrygian and Lydian modes, substitute chords, spare use of the tonic chord. Lyrically, I like clever turns of phrase, desert-dry wit, alliteration and what I’d generously call substandard caucasian rapping. These still feature in the remixes but they still feel very fresh.
I grew up buying 12-inch remix singles. My favorite artists reimagined by Shep Pettibone, Trevor Horn, Daniel Miller, Nile Rodgers. Those extended mixes were the real versions to me. A radio edit is more of a movie trailer to a bigger film, the remix is the blockbuster. Dance music is supposed to take its time. It’s a trance that should last longer than three-and-a-half minutes. You’re supposed to lose yourself in it.
Spotify would prefer everything run under three minutes to maximize completion rates and stream counts, and that instinct is the enemy of what I was trying to do. So I made both short and long mixes. But the extended versions are what I prefer. Releasing them was a small act of defiance. Algorithms have no memory of the vinyl turntable age and in fact actively try to destroy it.
Reimagination Vol. 1 by M4TR : The Remix Album You’ll Need to Hear Twice, Indie Boulevard
“Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1” by M4TR is built like a hall of mirrors: you walk in and see yourself, but slightly altered. The angle of light has shifted by a couple of degrees, and suddenly a familiar silhouette takes on an entirely new character. The album is constructed precisely around this effect — the barely perceptible gap between radio edit and extended version, where the full scope of creative craft reveals itself. M4TR is a collaboration in the truest sense.
The interplay between AJ’s songwriting and the producers’ reimagining is what gives “Reimagination” its unusual density: the songs arrive fully formed in their radio edits, already rich with AJ’s melodic and lyrical identity, and the remixes peel back the surface to expose entirely new dimensions underneath.
Each of these tracks, it turns out, had a second life all along, existing beyond the confines of the airwave format. A remix album worth hearing twice — the first time for pleasure, the second for understanding. And somewhere at the bottom of that second listen, like a diamond at the bottom of a champagne glass, the essential truth reveals itself: club music is capable of genuine transformation — when the people behind the console know exactly which wire to re-solder.
Album Review: M4TR & AJ Solaris– Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1, Loudness
AJ Solaris has been doing his thing under the M4TR banner for the better part of a decade — blending new wave, synthpop, disco, and funk into something that doesn't fit neatly into any one box, which is probably the point. Working out of Washington DC, he's quietly racked up 2.7 million streams across 4,000 playlists in 150 countries, and last year's Love Is the Revolution crossed a million on its own. So when it came time to figure out what to do next with that album, he did something pretty reasonable: handed it to two producers who know exactly what a dancefloor wants — and in doing so, found a way to carry his music, and the emotions packed inside it, into corners of the world it hadn't quite reached yet.
From up here, with all that space and noise around him, you can see what he can't yet: that life didn't end, it just got wider. It's a strange and quietly powerful thing to do with an arrangement — to use sheer fullness to suggest perspective, to make a bigger mix feel like looking back from a few years down the road and finally being able to breathe. And it's the right way to end the album. After everything that came before — all the obsession and grief and ego and loss — this one lifts you up just enough to remember what the music was for in the first place.
LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION (3rd Album)
Love Is The Revolution: M4TR’s emotionally ambitious album, Plastic Magazine
Since rising from Washington DC’s creative underground, AJ Solaris has been making a significant impression in alternative pop under the moniker M4TR. M4TR is a fully formed sonic identity where new wave synths collide with disco grooves, funk bounce and futuristic soul. Since launching the project in 2016, AJ Solaris has developed a sound he fittingly describes as “apocalyptic electronic grooves from alternative futures,” a phrase that captures both the drama and playfulness pulsing through his work.
The record explores romantic obsession, communal bonds, grief and the chaos of emotional vulnerability, wrapping all of it in engaging, genre-fluid production. Commenting on the record, he shares, “We’re living in a time when everything feels like it could collapse at any moment. But if love is the one thing that can pull us back from the brink, then what choice do we have but to keep reaching for it?”
That hopeful defiance runs deep through the album where AJ brings together his love for layered production with a clear emotional context, allowing each song to be both sonically adventurous and human. It’s dancefloor catharsis with a poetic heart, eerily timed to deliver a welcome moment of uplifting energy in tumultuous times.
When the ’80s Meet the Apocalypse of Love: The New M4TR Album “Love Is The Revolution”, Voxwave
Into a world buried in monotony, crisis, and routine bursts the new release “Love Is The Revolution” by M4TR. This album brings back the spark that makes life real, vivid, and thrilling. More than that, it has the power to transform everything around us, to fill the everyday with meaning and joy. With this record, M4TR seems to deliver a message, living means more than just breathing. It means taking risks, dreaming big, and sometimes being a bit of a romantic. Like the frontier AJ Solaris, inspired by the winds of change, leading his project M4TR (Music 4 The Revolution) into a new era of sound. “Love Is The Revolution” was released, a grand concept where synthpop, funk-groove, and disco-light create a whimsical dance of retrofuturism, uniting the past and the future.
The album’s themes explore the power of love, its highs, losses, and reflections – reminding us that despite the dullness of routine and predictability, love is the very elixir capable of bringing back the passion, madness, and courage we so desperately lack. Solaris says: “We’re living in a time when everything feels like it could collapse at any moment.” And perhaps it is in this music that many will find the key to reignite the fire of adventure within themselves and make life more colorful once again. An album of twelve tracks that reveal the complexity and multifaceted nature of the feeling called Love.
Love in Chaos: M4TR’s Electrifying Album ‘Love Is The Revolution’, Hail Tunes
Throbbing bass, hypnotic vocals, big beats, complex melodies, and commentary on the zeitgeist—M4TR’s third studio album ‘Love Is The Revolution’ has all that and more. The 12-track album was released on June 23, 2025, and the word “love” is the common denominator running through this ambitious work. ‘Love Is The Revolution’ is about love in all its complexities: the euphoric, the messy, the chaotic, and the painful. Musically, M4TR delves deeper into synthpop, funk, and disco, conjuring hypnotic, massive dance anthems and quiet, personal ballads. M4TR continues to imagine a world, build worlds, and inhabit these imagined worlds in full color and in spectacular fashion.
DISCOGRAPHY
Explore a decade of M4TR's back catalog and deep tracks. There's something for everyone: new wave, synthpop, disco, funk, punk, ska, reggae, love songs, epic ballads. Get the full digital box set exclusively on Bandcamp.
BANDCAMP DIGITAL BOXSET - 35% OFF
VINYL
Start an analog revolution. Get physical copies of the best of M4TR so you have something to listen to post-apocalypse.
ABOUT
AJ Solaris’ future wave art-pop project M4TR (Music 4 The Revolution) brings you good times for the end times. Merging synthpop, nu-disco, and funk with wit and social critique, the project explores modern collapse and cosmic rebirth through a high-fidelity electronic lens.
Newly relocated to Chicago by way of Washington, DC, AJ just released Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1, a collection of world-class dance collaborations with Billboard-topper Mr. Mig (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake) and Grammy-winner Philip Larsen (Kylie Minogue, Soft Cell, Erasure, OMD). Reimagination: The Remixes Vol. 2 will be released in 2026.
The Reimagination collection follows M4TR’s acclaimed album Love Is The Revolution (2025) and a decade of sonic rebellion including Rock To Resist By, Next, and M4TR LIVE, reaching 2.8M+ streams on 4K+ playlists in 150 countries.
AJ is looking for collaborators in Chicago. Scroll down...