It starts in grayscale. No sex. No pulse. Just a numb rhythm pulsing through your body, like you’ve been stuck in the same hookup with the same blank expression on your face, pretending it’s fun. That’s what Galaxy of Color by WOLVES, featuring X. ARI, rips apart. My whole life was black and white but… you made me see color. I don’t know what kind of fuck opened that third eye, but she doesn’t sound the same after. Falling in love isn’t the point. This is about finding the person who strips you open—emotionally, physically—and you don’t even flinch when they do it. You arch into it. You say thank you.
WOLVES already has a reputation for bending genre into something slick and sweat-drenched. Marc Avery and Sean Carney are the kind of LA boys who build pop with the DNA of Coldplay and Rihanna, then rub it down with trap bass and glossy alt-rock drama. You can hear the past in it. There’s the fuck-it-all attitude of Chicago winters in Marc’s voice, and the clean, big-studio shimmer in the way Sean shreds through the mix. Their sound moves. It crashes and curls, never safe, never tame.
They’ve dubbed their genre Surf Trap, and it fits—the blend is warm, stylish, and always pushing forward. Their tracks have landed everywhere from BET and ESPN to The CW’s All American, and they even popped up on NBC’s SONGLAND in season two.
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“We wondered what it would be like if we took all these different influences we loved—artists like Rihanna, Post Malone, Coldplay, Earth, Wind, and Fire—and rolled them all into one band today,” Marc muses.
WOLVES know how to pull in collaborators who match their intensity, and with X. ARI on lead, this one hits harder than usual.
X. ARI comes in with her own kind of fire and duets with Marc here. A Toronto-born artist and mental health advocate now based in LA, she’s built a reputation for turning personal breakdowns into polished, genre-blurring anthems. Her sound lives at the edge—part alt-pop, part electronic grit, always emotionally surgical. She’s also a vocal force in the LGBTQIA+ community, folding that urgency into everything she makes. Everything she releases feels like survival set to a beat.
Her voice is soaked in clarity—equal parts celestial and sharp, and every note holds. When she hits COLOR… COLOR… COLOR! it strikes like it means something. X. ARI’s whole thing is turning pain into power, and you can feel that in the way the lyrics bloom. Everything in my world was shaded / Energy turned dark I was jaded / It was you who helped me repaint it. The words are steady. There’s no drama in her truth.
She calls it a galaxy of color because the feeling doesn’t fade when the moment ends. You brushed all the dust off my halo, she says, and it lands like something she’s never said out loud before. There’s nothing innocent about it. It’s raw, exposed, almost too honest to be beautiful. That’s what gives it weight. Nobody’s getting saved here. This is about impact—the kind that stays on your body even after the light changes.
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Verse two goes big. You are the ring to my Saturn / Spun me around like a dancer. Marc grabs the lead vocals here and turns the emotion into spectacle—loud, cosmic, dramatic. Then he cuts through it. I was an emergency case. The line is quiet, but it stings. He says it without trying to dress it up. Then—The glow of your glorious face / Brighter than the Milky Way. It doesn’t match the rest. It’s inflated, maybe even a little absurd. But in the middle of all that vulnerability, he needs it to be.
The production pulls it into motion. The chorus swells with layered vocals and a bassline that feels low and steady, like it was made for a night that doesn’t end early. The sound has weight, but it’s smooth. You could drive to it. You could fall into someone to it. It keeps everything just under the surface—no glitter, no neon. The glow lingers after everything else fades.
X. ARI keeps coming back to don’t want you to let me go. The way she says it, it doesn’t feel like begging. She’s holding her ground. The connection’s already cracked her open, and now she wants to stay there, inside the feeling.
By the time we hit that last hook—I was just a lonely star / Until you opened my heart—it’s clear they’re not reaching anymore. X. Ari & Marc are remembering. The color’s already there. Everything looks different now, and there’s no turning it down.
