MARIS

pop rock · indie rock

MARIS is the stage name of Maris Maddux-Ward, a pop and rock singer-songwriter born on 16 September 1999 in Missoula, Montana and now based in Los Angeles. She began playing music at around six years old, starting with jazz, and won the tenth First Night Spotlight competition on New Year's Eve in 2014 before competing on American Idol. Her debut album, Gravity, arrived in 2023 with an accompanying short film, released through Black House. Her writing pairs heartland rock structures with glam-pop arrangement, and she cites Queen, Whitney Houston, Prince and One Direction as influences. Her 2025 collaboration with Caroline Kingsbury, Give Me a Sign, reached a million streams within a month of release, was added to more than twenty-five Spotify editorial playlists, appeared on Spotify's Best Pop Songs of 2025 list and placed fourth on Stereogum's ranking of the year's top pop songs. She has been selected three times for Spotify's Fresh Finds class. Elton John compared her to Lady Gaga and Freddie Mercury on his Rocket Hour radio program, and she has been profiled by Rolling Stone, LADYGUNN, Under the Radar and Wonderland. She has toured nationally in support of The Wrecks, Maude Latour, A R I Z O N A, Anna of the North and Kingsbury, co-headlined a United States tour with Kingsbury in autumn 2025, and played Boston Calling on a bill with Ed Sheeran and Chappell Roan. Recent releases include the single Losing People and the title track of a forthcoming EP, MOSH★PIT. She appears at MilkBoy in Philadelphia.

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