Dallas Indie-Pop Singer Alex O'aiza Wants To Be Part of a Bigger Story

Alex O’aiza is all too familiar with the ways of the independent artist. In addition to putting out addictive indie-pop tracks with a special brand of rawness found through his therapy sessions, he’s been hard at work at his day job in Denton, working to fund his musical endeavors. His latest is “Let You Go,” a breezy, self-aware breakup track, with a dazzling pink music video filmed in collaboration with Irving’s Coffee Pot studios.

The song tells the story of two people letting go of a relationship and aiming to do so in the healthiest, most mature way possible. O’aiza, 26, wrote the song last December, taking inspiration from The 1975 after having seen them in concert the month before.

“I was coming off ... not from a relationship, but romantic involvement I had with someone,” O’aiza says, fresh off an eight-hour shift at work on an August evening, just days after premiering the video. “She and I ended up kind of splitting off and going our own ways, just because that's what life demanded for both of us. And in that situation, it’s me saying, ‘I understood that you're needing something else, and I'm needing something else.’ This is what life is and what the reality is.”

In the song’s accompanying visual, O’aiza is seen waking up with a feeling of unease before dancing the pain away in his apartment, rocking a pink shirt and turning on the TV to see himself performing in front of a pink background.

O’aiza wrote the script for the video with Lauren Sultan and he teases that the video is the beginning of a larger narrative.

In addition to dreamy indie-pop music, O’aiza wants to include Spanish records in his repertoire. Last year, he released a Spanish track called “Adios Tal Vez,” a more principled pop-rock breakup anthem reminiscent of early-aughts Latin pop by the likes of RBD and Juanes.

Perhaps this is a callback to the music that made O’aiza fall in love with the art in the first place. He lived in Mexico between the ages of 5 and 8, when he often listened to Julieta Venegas and Sin Bandera.

“Over there in Mexico, Pepsi had a marketing campaign, and whenever you would buy in bulk, they would give you a little CD with five singles,” says O’aiza. “I was obsessed with collecting those little discs, and I still have them.”

The seed for his love of music was planted from a young age, but O’aiza says he didn’t think about pursuing music as a career until the end of high school. Still, he wrote songs now and then, which he would hold close to himself for years.

One of the first songs O’aiza wrote was called “Heaven.” He lay down the bones of the song when he was 15 years old and revisited it many times over the course of 10 years.
Last year, while in Los Angeles in studio sessions with producers and songwriters Jojo Centineo and Santiago Holder, O'aiza came across skeletons of the song in his hard drive.

“I was like ‘Wow, I remember this one being cool,’ so I was just listening to all these ideas, and thinking that I need to pick the best ones, and then maybe can build off of those,” O’aiza says. “And I just remember, I was listening to this band called The Preatures. They're from Australia, and the singer — she's a powerful rock singer. [I was inspired by] this particular song from The Preatures in how they transition from verse to the chorus, and that pre-chorus section, and the way they they were hitting certain chords at a certain cadence and just crazy. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think that will work on this idea.’”

O’aiza describes the song “Heaven" as “a celebration of life in the midst of what today feels like apocalyptic chaos.” On the song, he sings over a percussive loop, matching the hopeful energy of a vibrant guitar and a rattling tambourine.

Outside of music, O’aiza is passionate about social causes. He has long been open about his father’s deportation journey and is also a proponent of affordable healthcare. O’aiza knows firsthand about the importance of good mental health.

He says therapy has helped both his creative process and his ability to understand himself better.

“I’ve made fairly major breakthroughs, where I'm understanding now where the core of my insecurities are,” O’aiza says. “And it’s given me a lot of context, understanding why I act a certain way, why I say the things that I say in the way that I say them, why I struggled with things that I struggled with. And a lot of it ties back to that core of insecurity that really stems from childhood.

"And now that I understand it, it'll be easy for me to give myself grace to be like, ‘OK, I know where this is coming from,’ and I'm a little bit more aware.”

Although O’aiza has released music rather sporadically over the past two years, he still has plenty more songs in the vault.

In July, he was in Los Angeles to work on tracks with CJ “SPCMN” Serrato. Plus, he’s been keeping up with TikTok trends, going hard with promos for “Let You Go.”

He’s at the point of his career when he prefers this slow burn approach over dropping a big collection of work at once.

In its YouTube listing, “Let You Go” is described as a “pilot” to something bigger. O’aiza doesn’t give too much away about this but promises that the result will be something that arrives in tandem with his growth process.

“I think my goal as an artist is to work up to the album, so from what I do here is a bunch of quality work that people get to recognize my sound,” he says. “And eventually, that debut album will not just mean something for people, but it'll be something for me in the journey, and my journey as an artist.”