Fever 333 are embracing a new era, confronting exhaustion, systemic injustices, and redefining their sound as Jason Aalon evolves from relentless frontman to vulnerable visionary. Check out our new Upset cover story.
Words: Alexander Bradley.
Photos: DJay Brawner.
It’s been four years since the murder of George Floyd shocked the world and reignited the Black Lives Matter movement. That devastating moment demanded more than just outrage – it needed voices to galvanise the movement and spark people into action. With the black panther emblazoned on their boiler suits and their unapologetic sound, Fever 333 were one of them. They were destined for it ever since they jumped out of the back of a truck at Randy’s Donuts in 2017 with instruments in hand, fury in their eyes and a message in their hearts. Forget the Grammy nominations and critical acclaim. Their music had always been important for connecting people to social injustice, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, it became all the more vital.
Amidst the COVID protocols, with the world watching in combined horror and hope, the band organised ‘LONG LIVE THE INNOCENT’, an online demonstration with funds going towards the BLM movement. Surrounded by screens that listed hundreds of victims, the trio educated, vented and celebrated in a fierce showing imbued with rage and love.
Taking a moment between songs, Jason Aalon said, “I realised I’ve been tired for years… ever since I realised what it meant to be Black in America. To be told, by way of construct… by an idea, that was created to keep people that look like myself, my family and friends, by design to keep us down. I realised that I’ve been tired for years.”
That was four years ago. He is still tired now.
The weight of the world can feel unbearable at times. School shootings tear apart communities in America. Wars rage in Ukraine and Palestine. The rise of the far-right across Europe and the UK feels relentless. It’s hard to keep up with the bad news, let alone process it emotionally. For Jason, who has been running on fumes for years now, activist burnout has hit hard. His own exhaustion, he feels, isn’t by accident. “I think that’s the plan, right?” Jason says with a shrug. “To overwhelm us so that we don’t know which way to look or go, or what to deal with first. That’s the plan.”
Jason has a point, but there’s no hiding that he is in a rut. Years of fighting have taken their toll. “The fatigue has rendered me seemingly depressed at times… or just uncertain and confused,” he admits.
“But I have to remind myself that it’s not all my fault, right? It’s not all my fault that I’m so tired. It’s not all my fault that I’m so worried about what world my kids are going to grow up in. It’s not just me,” he continues.
This vulnerability is new for Jason. Known for his relentless energy and how he has used his platform to highlight and battle against injustice, it’s a stark shift from the frontman we have come to know. Yet, this shift is a necessary one and a change he is carrying through into the next evolution of the band.
“I think that’s actually the next era of Fever,” he explains, owning his vulnerability. “It’s more human, rather than this seemingly overly ambitious and almost, to some people, delusional sense of hope. I want people to know that the hope available to us will always be there, because that’s what we do as humans. Progress is the name of the game. That’s how we survive. That’s how this species will continue. Hope and progress are always available. We just have to remember that we possess that power, and there are times where I will falter and forget, and I need to be reminded by yourself and others that people want more than what’s being given to us.”
That change in his outlook – some of which he attributes to parenthood and getting older – has become the foundation for Fever 333’s new album, ‘Darker White’. On several occasions, Jason refers to the album as the “intersection” of a lot of varying ideas. It’s the crossroads of the “statistical and evidence-based” songwriting with his more emotional, first-hand experiences. It’s the intersection of his public bravado and his depressive thoughts. In the way the title suggests, it’s light and dark. Wrong and right. And those contrasts are carried through sonically too.
Jason has spent over 15 years as a dynamic vocalist, often chaotic when you look back on some of letlive’s work. On ‘Darker White’, the singer embraces his rap roots more than ever before.
“My first love is rap and soul and funk and R&B. That’s my first love. So before I was in a band, I was in a faux R&B group with people from my block and then I was in a rap group, and I would go to battles in Leimert Park. Me and my friends, we would freestyle every single day. We would battle each other every single day,” he reminisces.
“So it’s actually just something that I’ve always been in love with and wanted to do more of. And I felt way more confident in my ability to create an environment for me to do that musically – a sonic environment with these songs and still incorporating guitars and various elements of rock music but being able to put together something that sounded unique enough and wasn’t just pandering to this new age of nu-metal and rock-rap. I wanted to do something a little more unique to me,” he says.
Name-dropping Tupac and Morrissey in the same line, the crowning moment of this blend of styles comes in ‘NEW WEST ORDER’, the album’s opening track. Self-reverentially, he raps, “Making punk rock hits with a little rap twist”, but, if anything, the balance between the two styles is a lot closer to equal on this album.
In the studio, it was a special moment as Jason recounts, “We were all kind of gassing each other up and being like, ‘This is new. This is something different’,” he beams.
“And that’s what I’m concerned with at the moment – just creating things that I’m excited about but also that I haven’t heard in this way.”
What follows on the album is dictated from that first point on ‘NEW WEST ORDER’. Big hooks, venom-spitting rapping, out-of-the-box synth sounds, head-bopping beats and crunching guitar tones in a melting pot. ‘HIGHER POWER’ is a powerful embrace to marginalised communities; namely people of colour and trans people. ‘NO HOSTAGES’ boasts a huge, poppy, hooks while taking aim at police brutality and new single ‘MURDERER’ flips the narrative with a tense, scuzzy-sounding, song of trying to survive when violence is around every corner. Feeling like it’s capping off “side one” comes ‘TOURIST’ – a kind of breezy, sickly sweet, Frank Ocean style number – which pushes their sound further than ever before.
In the second half, the narrative of the album comes into its own. The struggles of living without turning to crime to make ends meet keeps coming up and while that struggle has been depicted hundreds of times in rap music, that frustration feels even more palpable when 333 all come in together.
‘PIN DROP’ finds Jason comfortably slipping back into the vein-popping screaming as he unleashes “I want peace / I want blood / I want tragedy / I want love” as his frustration over his country’s justice system and systemic racial injustice.
Coming full circle, the album’s closer asks, “Why he always mixin’ rock’n’roll with some rap?” as he certifies this new sound as ‘mob music”.
That whistle-stop tour of ‘Darker White’ does nothing to accurately capture the shift that’s happened within Fever 333 on this album, though.
Fever 333’s last release, ‘WRONG GENERATION’, came just a few months after George Floyd’s murder and was packed with the explosive energy of that moment. The album was their second in 18 months and followed a period in which you were never too far away from a new track from the trio. No one would have expected it would have taken four years for them to return with another album, least of all, Jason.
In the aftermath of their live demonstration and the album that followed, he believed it would signify a time in which Fever 333 would be more active, more creative, than ever. Instead, things went downhill.
“The way I put it is, when you focus too much on individuals, you do a disservice to the people. And I think that I had to focus too much on individuals,” he reasons.
Although it’s kind of a cryptic response, it makes a bit more sense when you put the pieces together. Call it “creative differences”, but Stephen Harrison and Aric Improta left the band last year and quickly formed House of Protection together.
Probing a little further, Jason opens up as he is “in this new age of transparency”. The crux of the issue that slowed them down was that 3(33) is a crowd, and that’s not the way Jason wants this project to operate.
“I started Fever as an idea that I had for a long time, and when I was writing and creating a lot of the objectives of the mission and the aesthetic, both ideologically and visually, these were just things that I was putting together in my room or my studio, and I started the project, brought them along with the intentions to present as a band, and we were playing live together and various things,” he explains.
The anthemic new single ‘NOSEBLEEDS’ really underlines Jason’s position as the driving force behind the band as he declares “I built this on my own” throughout.
Originally, Jason had begun writing songs for this project with John Feldman and Travis Barker, but Fever 333 is his vision, his creation. He acknowledges the confusion that might have been caused by presenting publicly as a band when the reality was the opposite.
When they began work on this album, Stephen and Aric brought their own ideas of what the band was and the direction the project should move in, which, in turn, compromised Jason’s vision. It led to some friction between them. Jason was not willing to back down.
It wasn’t about an inability to compromise out of stubbornness or even about artistic integrity – if anything, he has been trying to remove his own ego from the band – but to come to a deal would dilute the mission that he set out on.
He admits that this is “a little existential” but the power dynamic was a make or break moment for him.
“When you cater to others, oftentimes, whether you know it or not, you’re being asked to amend something about yourself, which is sometimes good, or you’re being asked to mute something about yourself. Or you’re being asked to put aside something about yourself so that they feel they have space, which is understandable. That’s a relationship,” he reasons.
“Then eventually, sometimes there comes a point where you’re being asked to do so many things that you either didn’t intend on, you weren’t ready for, or you actually just don’t want to do, and you’re being asked to do these things, and they start to get in the way of what your purpose is.’
“And if your purpose, or you believe your purpose, is to be of service, well then you’re not only letting yourself down, but you feel like you’re letting many, many others down.”
“You’re just trying to please a few people but then the weight – I think this is where I am right now with this element of uncertainty and sadness – that’s one thing, but the amount of others that I’ve potentially let down if I don’t continue on doing what I said I was going to do, that’s a unique type of weight,” he admits.
Now, Fever 333 move forward with Jason front and centre with Thomas Pridgen, Brandon Davis and April Kae all backing up his vision.
The mission remains the same. “It’s just power. It’s just feeling your power, understanding your power by recognising that there are systems and powers at play that are working to take that from you,” he states and recognises that his role in that mission is evolving.
‘DARKER WHITE’ marks the end of an era of upheaval for Fever 333 and the beginning of a rejuvenated, redefined, project. Jason may not have all the answers right now, but by embracing his flaws and shedding the ego of past albums, he’s shifting from leading a charge to fostering a community where Fever 333 can be a true vehicle for change. Artistically, Jason remains the authority behind the project, but the power of Fever 333 doesn’t lie within the band itself – it lies in the number of people it can connect with. That is the real strength in numbers.
Fever 333’s new tracks ‘MURDERER’ and ‘NOSEBLEED’ are out now. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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