Ari Abdul has said out loud what most viral artists only think: “For a long time, I had this anxiety about never beating it or just having that one song.” The “it” is “Babydoll,” her accidental 2021 debut that went RIAA Gold and past 600 million combined streams. The answer she found was not a bigger hit. It was volume, honesty, and falling in love with the job she never applied for.
Why would a Gold record cause anxiety?
Because Abdul never planned any of this. She was a Brooklyn marketing student who recorded a song on a whim at a friend’s studio internship; one sped-up TikTok edit later, she was fielding label emails. When a career starts with a peak, every next step gets measured against it. Even years in, she admitted to Rolling Stone UK: “Honestly, I still have not processed any of it.”
The full quote, given to House of Solo in July 2025, is worth reading complete, because the second half is the whole story:
For a long time, I had this anxiety about never beating it or just having that one song, but over time, I’ve truly fallen in love with just making music. It’s become such a passion where now I love the songs so much and they mean so much to me that I just keep going on and making them.Ari Abdul, House of Solo
How did she write her way out?
Not by chasing “Babydoll” clones. The catalog since reads like a deliberate widening: the Fallen Angel EP in October 2022, a steady 2023 single run, then the CCTV EP in October 2023, a six-track surveillance-horror concept that Zero Nine Magazine called her “villain arc.” CCTV turned the very thing that caused the anxiety, sudden hyper-visibility, into subject matter: cameras, watchers, obsession.
But by her own account, even that era kept a layer of armor on. “While making CCTV, I was still scared to be open about myself, so I would craft those songs to have the emotion/meaning deep within them but mask them with fiction,” she told Stardust Magazine in 2025. “This project no longer has that mask. It’s just real to me.” The project in question is her self-titled debut, made with Grammy-nominated producer Stint and Ella Boh, and its centerpiece single “LEAVE ME HERE” confronts childhood trauma directly, with a real scream kept in the bridge.
The cure for the one-hit fear was not a second hit. It was two hundred more songs.
What does the ledger say now?
The math has quietly settled the question. “Babydoll” remains the biggest song, but it is now the anchor of a 947-million-stream catalog, not the whole of it. The live business tells the same story: a sold-out eight-date HELLGIRL Tour in 2023, the God’s Watching co-headline with Isabel LaRosa in 2024, sold-out China shows the same year, an opening run on Nessa Barrett’s Aftercare World Tour in 2025, and her own Change Tour extending through the UK and Europe in 2026. Nobody tours three continents on one song.
The fan girl who kept going
What makes Abdul’s version of this arc unusual is that the resolution is genuine affection for the work. “One of my favorite things is making music now... I really did fall in love with just going out there and singing the songs,” she told House of Solo. To Ones to Watch she framed it from the audience’s side of the barricade: “I love it. I am super grateful for it. I’ve always been the fan girl that idolizes the artist.”
And the vulnerability that the anxiety once blocked has become the method. “For most of my life I’ve had a hard time expressing my feelings, to the point where it was physically painful... but then I found the people I love working with, and now there’s no limits,” she says in her Wasserman bio. The one-hit question has a factual answer now, visible in the streams and the tour routings. But the more interesting answer is the one she gave herself: she stopped trying to beat the song and started outnumbering it.