M 4 T R
SONG MEANINGS
LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION (3rd Album)
I went into this album studying my dad's old Beatles records, struck by how disciplined the Fab Four were, impeccable chords, tight structures, everything about love. M4TR's first two albums were all over the map, songs running long with no real pop instinct behind them, so this time I set a rule: every song under four minutes, every song a different point of view on love. But discipline in structure doesn't mean simplicity in sound. I built these songs on exotic chord structures and modes, parallel major and minor keys, Mixolydian and Phrygian modes, substitute chords that refuse to resolve where your ear expects them to, the same architectural trick Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Talking Heads used to make the familiar feel strange.
Sonically, this is future wave art-pop, synthpop and nu-disco and funk pulling from influences as diverse as Arcade Fire, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Daft Punk, Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Scissor Sisters, Depeche Mode, Nile Rodgers, Eurythmics, Erasure, Talking Heads, The Killers, Gorillaz, Djo, Lola Young and Chappell Roan. I wanted a happy-sad juxtaposition running through every track, danceable grooves carrying lyrics that explore infatuation, grief, obsession, or doubt, so the music never stops exploring.
LET LOVE TURN THIS WORLD AROUND
This song emerged from a legal psilocybin ceremony in Holland where I felt I encountered a cosmic feminine force, something ancient and eternal, closer to how Hindu tradition describes Kali. She revealed how everything is built and unmade through her, creation and destruction moving as one motion. The "queen without a crown" names her, and "do you hear her, do you feel her" invites you to sense that same presence.
HOOKS
I wrote this as a conversation between a fish desperate to stay hooked and a lover who doesn't realize she's being reeled in too. The speed it came together in, under two hours, mirrors exactly what it's about: sometimes you fall for something simple and you don't question it. It's proof that a song, like love, doesn't need to be complicated to be real.
THE SPEKTRE
This song is written from the perspective of a stalker who's fallen in love with a woman who doesn't even know he exists, something I was channeling from all sorts of horror movies over the years. I wanted the darkness to sit underneath a groove so infectious you'd almost miss what the lyrics are actually saying. That contrast, danceable funk hiding something genuinely unsettling, is the whole point.
JUST OUT OF TIME
This song lives in the moment of realizing I was the only one still holding on after a college relationship ended. It's about the alienation of unrequited love, loving someone who delivers the ending without any real feeling behind it. That coldness in lack of feeling was more mystifying to me than the actual break up. Like the romance never happened.
NO TOMORROW
This track is my response to watching old Cold War fears resurface in real time with the war in Ukraine. I packed it with as many 80s cultural references as I could fit, because that decade had a habit of writing cheerful, even celebratory songs about the end of the world, and I wanted to honor that same defiant spirit. It's a song that takes existential fear seriously without letting it win.
COUP DE GRACE
This song is my belief that we defeat authoritarianism through grace, calculation, and patience, not by returning cruelty for cruelty. I wanted the ending to feel like a decisive but composed victory over a would-be king, something closer to resolve than revenge. To be victorious is to rise above.
SIREN SONG
This song borrows the myth of sirens luring sailors onto the rocks to capture what songwriting's madness actually feels like. I get pulled in by a melody, some chords, a groove then drown in it through obsessive revision until I'm helpless, no longer able to tell if what I've built is any good at all. Like a sailor too far from shore, I've lost the ability to judge my own work and I struggle to stay afloat.
KILL THE SELF
I wrote this about my closest childhood friend who I lost to his own destruction. What happened to him mirrors something I've watched happen to countless people I know, and to the country itself, a slow surrender to toxic narcissism. I wanted the chorus to work both ways, a plea to one person and a warning to a culture that keeps choosing ego over connection.
LIFE WITHOUT HER
This song is my advice to young men navigating dating today, don't objectify women, and don't hide behind a phone screen. It takes real courage, what people now call "riz," to walk up and talk to someone in person, and you have to muster that courage and take the risk or you may regret it for the rest of your life. The song lives inside that single moment, seize it or lose it forever and live a lesser life.
FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT
I wrote this in honor of my bandmates and every musician who's ever played to an empty room like it mattered, because it does. It became a philosophy beyond music, that some battles you enter knowing you'll likely lose, and you fight them anyway because the effort itself is the victory. The right path matters more than the right outcome.
LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION
This song carries the album's core belief, that love is the cosmic force keeping everything, planets, seasons, people, in motion and balance. I started this project thinking "revolution" meant something political, but it grew into something larger, the same force behind every uprising and every act of change. There's no external solution waiting in the twilight or firelight, only the choice to let that force move through you.
POLARIS
This song is about the belief that we'll be cosmically reunited with the people we've lost, written for my father, gone since I was a child, and my grandmother, lost more recently. Polaris is the north star, the fixed point you steer by, and losing either of them felt like the sky itself had gone dark. It's for anyone who's lost their own Polaris and still believes love can close that distance.
NEXT (2nd Album)
Next is the sound of starting over. Written after the breakup of the first live band, during a year when the whole planet turned insular, it's the album where the organic rock sound gave way to synths, pointing toward the future wave. I revisited some of my earliest compositions and finally got them right, and that same locked-down, isolating mood shaped the new songs too. Sometimes you just keep going, muddling through the way the whole world did that year, and this record is a tapestry of ideas from that time, unified by an emerging future wave sound that hadn't fully found its shape yet.
COLORBLIND
This song came out of the summer of 2020, sitting with a single word, colorblind, that carries real confusion inside it. People on both sides of the political spectrum use the exterior of our skin to assign value or worth, and my own ideal, closer to Martin Luther King's original vision, is that we learn to see past that into the spiritual self underneath. The lyrics don't argue for a side, they sit in that confusion and ask what the word should really mean.
CANCEL CULTURE
I wrote this out of a real sense of alienation, watching a progressive political side I once identified with grow increasingly censorious and self-righteous, more interested in punishment than persuasion. Rather than stay quiet after being warned I'd get cancelled, I wrote directly about that climate of silencing. Real tolerance has to include the opinions that make people uncomfortable, not just the easy ones. My mind isn't something anyone else gets to own or police.
IN IT TO WIN IT
This song grew out of my love for futbol, especially the World Cup, which felt like the perfect metaphor for winning at anything, sports, politics, life in general. The message underneath the football imagery is simple, you play from the heart, not by someone else's corrupt rulebook, and that's how underdogs actually come out on top. It's a political rallying cry disguised as a football anthem.
I WILL HAUNT YOU
I wrote this as a letter from a soldier still alive, writing home to his wife from the war, not yet knowing he won't survive it. He dies before he can return, and comes back as a ghost, haunting her house and her life in an attempt to keep the promise he made in that letter. It's meant to capture the true nature of love transcending death, tender at first, then turning possessive and haunting once she falls for someone else and he can't accept losing her.
CLEAN
I wrote this about the parallel abuse of women and the earth by the same force, mankind's need to dominate and control. When COVID forced humanity to retreat, I watched the planet answer back almost immediately, rising in a feminine glory that felt like rebirth. The song holds both truths, a woman leaving her abuser and the earth reclaiming herself the moment she's no longer restrained.
THE BITTER END
This song is my gift to my wife, built around the plain truth that loving someone for decades means loving them into old age, memory loss and all. I used the four seasons to trace a whole life together rather than just the romantic beginning. The bitter end is simply what waits at the far side of a real, decades-long commitment. The final chapter of an epic novel.
ROCK TO RESIST BY (1st Album)
Rock To Resist By is where it all began. Music for the Revolution was meant to be the name of a second solo album, but the political moment shifted so fast in 2016 that the title became something bigger, a moniker, M4TR. It's a rallying cry, a mission statement, a catalog, different bands, a worldview that transitions from defiance to hope. That same restless instinct has since become the philosophy animating music for a decade. Dancing through dystopia, creating good times for the end times, and turning to love as the real revolution, traces straight back to this record.
NEVER ACT YOUR AGE
This song is my pushback against the idea that midlife has to mean slowing down or giving up on who you might still become. I wanted it to feel like a wake-up call, that reinvention isn't reserved for the young, it's available to anyone willing to take it. Age is just a number next to the real question, are you still dreaming.
ANGRY WHITE MAN
This song exists because I was genuinely shocked at how openly nativism and racism resurfaced after the 2016 election. I had songs of righteous rage on repeat at the time, and I needed to write something with that same fire, pointed at the bigotry itself. I was fucking pissed, and still am. I assumed an "angrier white man" persona, much angrier than the angry white men I was calling out. Ignorant nativism and turning away the world's poor and huddled masses is simply un-American.
CALLOUT TO THE NATION
This song is a call to political action, but it's also the earliest sign of what M4TR would become, dancing through dystopia before I even had the words for it. I wanted urgency and groove to coexist, testifying rather than vilifying, saving the people we love instead of just tearing down an opponent. The "lilliputian" line was my quiet way of calling out a small man given far too much power.
WALKOUT ON THEIR WORLD
This song is about youth activism and the decision to check out entirely from a world the older generation broke and refuses to fix. It's built around the idea of a general strike, walking away from institutions rather than begging them to change. Leaving isn't surrender here, it's the first act of taking the future back.
MONKEY GOD
This song is a parable about a monkey who thought he was a god, but turns out he's just a monkey. I wrote it about the evolution and devolution of humanity but specifically about Elon Musk. It applies to any broligarch convinced that enough wealth, technology and power make them omnipotent. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman all suffer from the same delusion.
SHADE OF BLUE
This song is about how progressives get so caught up arguing over minor differences in ideology that they lose sight of the actual fight and lose. I wanted to capture that exhausting spectacle, people posturing over shades of purity while the real threats go unchallenged. The refrain, you got to do to get it done, is a plain challenge to stop talking and start acting like you want to win and you understand what is at stake.
LADY WORTH FIGHTING FOR
I wrote this song after Me Too broke calling out the men who abused women, but also would-be tyrants who abuse Lady Liberty herself, treating both as the same kind of violation. The lyrics move between defending an individual woman and defending the country. On one hand, a woman's honor needs defending. On the other women, and America, are so strong, she can defend herself. It's long past time we try a female head of state and see if that works out better for us. It can't get worse.
BOY
I wrote this song for my young son, whose sense of right and wrong has always been shaped by clean, classic morality tales, Ulysses Grant leading the Union Army, Allied forces invading Normandy, even the Rebel Alliance's use of The Force in Star Wars. Simple tales of good versus evil often turn out to be the truest ones. It's my hope he holds onto that clarity as he grows into the world. It's also about being in awe of something you created as it recreates you.
NO NEVER GIVE UP
I wrote this for people who've run out of hope entirely, not the mildly discouraged, but the truly weary. The message is simple, keep going even when you can't see a reason to. It's built as a sing along, because hope carried together is easier to hold onto.
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.
LIVE
For the past decade, M4TR has performed live as a solo act, a quartet and a quintet in Washington DC, Chicago and more. AJ has played 100+ shows at Uncommon Ground, Gallery Cabaret, Jammin Java, Songbyrd Café, Pearl Street Warehouse, The Renegade, Public Bar Live, The Pocket, Cherry Blossom Festival, Adams Morgan Porchfest, Crossroads, BOOM Charlotte, Georgetown Fete de Musique, Launch Music Fest and more.
AJ is now a Chicago resident looking for collaborators for live shows.
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...