I know what it’s like to drag old versions of yourself around. The eighteen-year-old who said too much, needed too much, believed the wrong things—the one you’d rather erase, but who keeps popping up in the mirror anyway. AJ Pena’s Human Beings starts there, with the ghosts of self-hatred and the strange ways we try to survive it. Three songs, three lenses on dehumanization—in ourselves, in others, in the systems we live under—and somehow by the end he’s offering something softer. Maybe even joy.
AJ’s been through more than most of us. Rediscovering joy after an involuntary movement disorder. Fighting through intervals of paralysis and severe chronic pain and rising from narcissistic abuse. His music is survival work, drawn from experience instead of abstraction. He blends that story with an alt-pop sound shaped by John Splithoff and Gavin DeGraw, the big-pop shimmer of The 1975 and Lawrence, and the lyrical intimacy of Braden Bales and Sophia James. You can hear the influence of musical theater in the way he builds drama into every chorus. He’s writing for anyone standing tall through invisible battles, and that weight makes these three songs feel like more than just tracks.
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The first one, Curse, stings because it’s too familiar. AJ admits, “I still cringe at what I did at 18 / was relying on online dopamine,” and I feel that line in my stomach. The endless scrolling, the compulsive sharing, the way we fake confidence, hoping someone else will call it real. He confesses “using accomplishments to prove my worth / faking my confidence for love that I deserved”—and it’s the kind of lyric that makes you remember exactly when you did the same.
What hits hardest is when the voice shifts. He stops punishing the past and starts speaking to it. “If the current me could be there now / I’d comfort the kid’s hurt tell him how.” That turn toward forgiveness feels bigger than a lyric, something lived and urgent. By the end, he’s repeating “no self hatred, no more curse” until it feels less like a chorus and more like a ritual. Even the most cliché line—“as cliché as it sounds, I was lost but I found”—lands because AJ shows himself without disguise, handing cliché back like it might still heal us. While the other two songs lean on different influences to push their message, Curse is the one that most clearly matches AJ’s long-term sound.
The story doesn’t stay in the past for long. With Quit, he dives into a quieter, darker kind of wound—the private addictions easier to hide than admit. The production drops into something more shadowed, while AJ sings “folks get reduced to clothes and skin / they’re merely used, means to an end.” Porn is the subject, but what he’s really after is intimacy—the way novelty numbs, the way screens warp, the way desire curdles into shame.
That repeated line—“could quit anytime”—is the giveaway. It loops like denial itself, the thing you tell yourself even when you know it’s already taken root. He digs deeper in verses that sting: “more exposure at a young age / no disclosure once they engage / warping ideas as access grows.” AJ strips away excuses and sings the truth as it is. When he sings “rarely discussed, easy to blame / a natural lust gets tied to shame,” you hear the weight of a culture that twists something human into something hidden. The whole song feels like a mirror most people don’t want to look into.
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By the time we get to the title track, Human Beings, the scope widens from private struggles to the systems that grind us down. AJ calls work “quicksand” and sings “time gets consumed / try escaping you’ll just lose room.” I’ve felt that—every calendar packed, every inbox stacked until there’s no room left for friends, let alone fun. He nails the way worth gets tied to income, how we measure our lives in output like we’re nothing more than machines.
The chorus pushes back: “why glorify output like we’re just machines / there may be doubt but we’re still human beings.” He reminds us that rest isn’t weakness, that “rest beats fatigue, a contradiction” worth fighting for. By the end, when he insists “having balance breeds productivity / no need to concede what makes us happy,” the EP closes on a call to step back into ourselves, a reminder to choose balance over burnout.
AJ Pena threads his whole life into these three songs—illness, recovery, abuse, resilience—and you can hear the influence of musical theater mixing with alt-pop heat. His influences shine through, but what carries it is his willingness to present the mess to us without disguise. Human Beings ends where it should: reminding us that even when we feel like cogs, we’re allowed to claim our humanity.
