Mareux biography

Mareux songs rarely start from zero. Aryan Ashtiani keeps a folder on his computer called “Mareux Kits,” filled with drum sounds, synthesizer patches and pieces of recordings that never became finished songs. When he begins something new, he digs through those abandoned sessions and pulls individual elements into whatever he is making now. He describes it as crate-digging through his own hard drive.

A sound made years earlier can return in a completely different setting. One unfinished project might hold the missing piece of another. The Mareux catalog has grown this way, with old and new material repeatedly cut apart and rebuilt.

That method runs through more than a decade of Mareux, from the 2013 EP Decade through the albums Lovers From the Past and Nonstop Romance. During that time, his bedroom project took Ashtiani to Coachella and stages around the world, while “The Perfect Girl” went double-platinum.

Ashtiani grew up in Mar Vista on the west side of Los Angeles. He picked up a guitar around age 10 or 11 and initially listened almost exclusively to rock. Summers spent visiting Iran brought him into contact with music that was harder to find at home. There, illegal satellite dishes carried Polish MTV and European dance, house and trance that rarely appeared on American television at the time. Some of it struck him as excessive, even absurd. The hooks stayed with him anyway.

“It opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities,” he recalls.

By high school, French electro and house had pushed Ashtiani from listening toward making music himself. He and his friends experimented with Mixcraft, a bare-bones recording program, while YouTube tutorials supplied an informal education in arrangement and songwriting. Justice was an early influence, although its maximal, heavy production sent him searching for a more minimal sound of his own.

Mareux began around 2011, when Ashtiani was uploading synth-pop and bedroom recordings to SoundCloud. The earliest tracks were mostly instrumental. He eventually felt they lacked replay value and began recording his own voice, less out of an ambition to become a singer than because the songs seemed to need one. He buried his inexperienced vocals in reverb and effects. That washed-out texture became part of the music.

The name arrived around the same time. Trying to invent something that sounded vaguely French, Ashtiani imagined the noise a French cat might make inside a house. The joke stuck, and Mareux became the name of the project.

The four-song Decade EP followed in 2013. “Cold Summer,” one of the first tracks on which Ashtiani fully committed to singing, became his most widely heard recording before “The Perfect Girl.” Listeners found the music through SoundCloud and the Eastern European social platform VK. Russian and Ukrainian fans were among the first to respond strongly, giving Mareux an international audience before Ashtiani had ever played a show.

That attention did not immediately turn music into a career. Between roughly 2016 and 2020, Ashtiani returned to college and worked through the science courses required to enter healthcare. School and work took over most of his life. He never expected Mareux to provide a living, but he kept recording whenever he could. Songs piled up without a release plan.

By 2019, Ashtiani had gathered some of those songs into the Predestiny EP and begun releasing music more consistently.. Around the same time, his 2015 interpretation of the Cure’s “The Perfect Girl” experienced its first unexpected surge. Miguel, who would later become his manager, sent him a link showing that the recording had accumulated hundreds of thousands of plays.

“I was like, ‘Oh shit, people actually fuck with me,’” Ashtiani remembers. “Maybe I should give this a second chance.”

He became more deliberate about maintaining an online presence while continuing school and work. Then “The Perfect Girl” surged again, this time becoming a global hit. Ashtiani left healthcare and committed himself fully to Mareux.

For a while, he regarded the breakthrough as an accident. The song had been sitting in his catalog for years before an enormous audience found it, without the kind of campaign normally built to produce that result. He sees it differently now. What looked sudden from the outside had grown out of years spent releasing music and letting listeners discover it in their own time.

“It feels like I was just slowly building something,” he says. “I did all the important stuff. I just made the music.”

The success brought Mareux to Coachella, sold-out shows and audiences around the world. It also created an immediate demand for an album. Ashtiani began assembling Lovers From the Past in late 2022 from songs written across the previous several years. “Killer” and the title track dated back to 2018 and had each been rebuilt four or five times. “Little Lies” entered the record only a few months before it was finished.

Released in 2023, Lovers From the Past gave those scattered years a shape. Piercing synthesizers and cavernous vocals carried songs about heartbreak, obsession and distance. When Ashtiani listened back to his earliest material after finishing the album, he could finally hear the same artist running through all of it. The songs had changed. The texture had been there from the beginning.

Ashtiani points to “Night Vision” as one of the clearest expressions of his musical instincts, while “Lovers From the Past” brings many sides of the project together in a single song. The album’s vinyl pressing has since become a sought-after collector’s item, and several of its songs now stand among Mareux’s most widely heard work.

Finishing the album cleared years of material from Ashtiani’s head. He was ready to make a different flavor of Mareux. On 2025’s Nonstop Romance, the music became more playful, more social and noticeably happier. “Wild at Heart” and the title track carried that energy. “Laugh Now Cry Later” (both the album’s saddest song and one of its oldest) kept one foot in the world of Lovers From the Past.

Ashtiani had grown tired of writing what he calls “sad bangers,” though romance never left the center of the project. Nearly every Mareux song is a love song in some form. Some come directly from experience. Others borrow from friends, films or situations he invents. Fiction has become another kind of source material: a story whose emotions can be taken apart and rebuilt somewhere else.

He describes Mareux as “the movie version” of himself. It is not an elaborate alter ego so much as the feeling of watching someone else play a character based on his life. That distance gives him room to pull from films, friends and invented situations without presenting every song as autobiography.

Darkwave, goth and post-punk are the labels most often attached to Mareux. They are not wrong, exactly, but they leave out a great deal of the machinery. Ashtiani’s references also include French electro, house, rock, synth-pop and the darker production found in hip-hop. He follows the tones that affect him most, the ones that feel romantic, depressing, damaged or sinister.

For Ashtiani, none of that atmosphere matters if the song underneath it does not hold up. He sometimes writes using only piano sounds, testing whether a composition can survive without production or familiar stylistic cues. “If the meat and bones are good, it doesn’t matter how you dress it up,” he says.

Then he dresses it back up. Software synthesizers are reshaped until they feel older and less pristine. The same drum sounds recur across years of recordings. Sessions made at different points in his life are cut apart and fitted together until their seams disappear. A finished Mareux song may sound as though every part arrived at once. On Ashtiani’s computer, it might contain pieces of several otherwise unrelated projects.

He is building Mareux’s third full-length album the same way. Currently planned for 2027, the record is being made both alone and with his friend Elliot at a studio in Chinatown. The new material returns to the darker, smokier atmosphere of his earlier work while retaining some of the range he opened up on Nonstop Romance.

A loose setting has begun to emerge around it: an escape from Los Angeles, a trip to Las Vegas and the unstable romance of a casino world. The title remains undecided. Ashtiani wants to satisfy listeners who have followed each version of Mareux, but he is holding the songs to a longer standard. They should still sound strong in 20 years.

That pursuit can keep him in the studio for 12 or 14 hours at a time, searching through saved sounds and unfinished ideas for the combination that makes a song undeniable. The archive gives him somewhere to begin. Each new song still has to earn its way out of the folder.

“I just want people to know that I hear them,” he says. “And it’s coming.”