ALPHA
MAGAZINE
It’s Aria Mody’s World
written by
CLINT PORTE
Aria Mody’s career, relationships, and momentum are all part of a greater learning process.
At age eighteen, Aria is accepting the challenge of daughter, an artist, a student, and a performer.
“Cancer sun, Scorpio rising, Leo Venus.” Aria tells ALPHA Magazine, laughing after asked about the cross on her neck. She explains she is “more spiritual than religious,” before pivoting to astrology and reciting her chart placements as if they help her to decode her entire being.
Much like her internal world, Aria’s talents and intelligence have always been part of the picture. Music was never a conscious decision so much as a passion that existed before she had the vocabulary to describe it. “I’ve just been singing my whole life,” she says, recalling how her mother used to record her in their bedroom, catching fragments of songs and melodies that came out more like instinct than practice.
One childhood moment stands out as a personal turning point. At 9, she was pulled onto a tavern stage by a guitarist and sang “You’re So Vain” in front of strangers. “As soon as I heard everyone applauding, I felt such a passion and this drive that I’m still trying to reach again,” she says.
The applause was more than validation. The revelation was that for the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to communicate through artistry.
A decade later, her audience has become entirely global. Direct messages from Dubai, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, the United States and many other places continually flood her inbox.
Aria remarks that the connection to her fans is emotional rather than geographic, and that people recognize themselves in what she is still learning to articulate. Music, for her, is an experience without borders. Aria’s biracial background has helped to set the stage for the audience she has cultivated.
Growing up with annual trips to India, she spent months in Ahmedabad and Vadodara, the home of Mahatma Gandhi.
Those visits were lessons in language, family structure, and cultural customs that could not be replicated in her hometown of suburban Edison, New Jersey. She describes these travels as grounding, yet fleeting.
“I am so proud to be Indian,” says Aria, with no qualifiers, speaking directly to the lack of positive South Asian portrayal in western entertainment. “I realized I want to be that person who could stand up for the other kids, the younger generation.” Learning about her culture is as important as learning how to advocate for it.
Her listening habits mirror her outlook on her identity; open and eclectic. Latin jazz-fusion sits next to experimental trap. Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso exist in the same mental playlist as Leon Thomas and Summer Walker. Indo-Western influences blend with contemporary pop and R&B, Bollywood textures with English hooks.
Aria actively experiments with how to make those influences coexist in her own work, and how to translate heritage into something contemporary.
Her catalogue reflects the diversity of her tastes, switching from pop toward R&B, seeking songs that challenge her voice and emotional range. Her international hit single, “TMO,” is the perfect fusion of electronic dance, Spanish language, dembow rhythms, and South Asian music motif, thanks to the vocal contributions of Indian-born singer Madhur Dhir.
Juxtaposed to her global records are her more Western records, such sinher gles “SECRET” and “No Distractions,” both records perched somewhere between the style of Jhene Aiko and Doja Cat.
Her music, she insists, is meant as an offering of love. “I make it because it comes from my heart, and I wish that I can give my heart literally out of my chest and hand it to you.”
At her core, Aria is a family-centric person, even, as her responsibilities have grown, trips to India have become shorter and more work oriented. Now, frequent whatsapp calls substitute for lack of proximity.
She still manages to keep her familial relationships strong, despite long periods of distance.
Chief among those relationships is her mother, Paul Mody, who immigrated to the U.S. at 19 and remains a steady guide and collaborator in Aria’s career. “People in the industry know me and my mom come in two peas in a pod,” she says. Their relationship is protective, intertwined, sometimes intense, but spoken about with gratitude.
“My relationship with my mom is very interesting. She's taught me so much about resilience, about hard work, just being a strong, independent woman in a society that's very male-dominated and is there to harm you. And I think that's something that she's shown me throughout the years, but I never really noticed until I started to do stuff on my own.”
In a family with over 20 medical physicians by trade, Aria was originally expected to carry the mantle as a physician herself. Her mother being a cosmetic dermatologist gave further proximity to that path. Yet, Aria chose differently. Although she has applied to physician assistant programs and been accepted, she has turned them down. “I love medicine, but medicine is not who I am.”
Deciding to be a trailblazer could have weighed on Aria. Instead, she chose her mother to be her personal referendum on decisiveness and confidence — “She's taught me so much about resilience, about hard work, just being a strong, independent woman. I’m a very vulnerable person that's my whole job as a musician so I think that was something I had to really grow and learn.”
Always pushing forward, Aria continues to challenge her personal conceptions of comfort. “The biggest fear you can have is to get everything you truly want.”
Acting is another art form Aria explores. spectrum of music videos, commercials, dramatic films and episodic projects. Aria has already dipped her toes in both Bollywood and Hollywood, accepting auditions major studios around the around the world. Her credits include parts in music videos, commercials and feature films — IP’s that undoubtedly put her name on the map.
Not to mention recently being accepted to the University of Southern California. Even though she plans to defer for one year in order to fulfill several projects in entertainment, Aria speaks of college as structure, something grounding amid the chaos of the industry. “I feel like education such an important thing regardless whether that being college experiencing the world having your independence.”
Aria Mody won’t pretend have it all figured out, but she seems to like it that way. She frames her life as an ongoing study in culture, ambition, vulnerability, and self definition. She is still learning how to be so many things; how to be an artist in an industry, how to be a daughter in motion, how to be a young woman who refuses to collapse into a single narrative. “I feel like life is so unpredictable that if I talked to my sixteen-year-old self and I told her where I'm at now, she would not believe her mind. And I think that's the beauty of it. I think the beauty of the industry and how unpredictable it is, is the thing that also keeps me hooked.”
And so the work continues.
THE NEWSLETTER
Subscribe to the Alpha Magazine newsletter to stay informed, hipped and aware of all things happening in the Alpha brand. This includes exclusive news & events, products and promotions. You may opt-out of our newsletter, hassle-free.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
MEN'S & WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT
THE ALPHA GROUP
MEDIA & PUBLICITY
RESOURCES
LOS ANGELES, CA