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Aaron James remembers where he was the first time he heard Linkin Park. He was nine years old, getting a lift to school from family friend Mick, who always wore dark glasses and looked punk. Mick stuck a mixtape into the car stereo featuring the classics – Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Motörhead - alongside some newer bands. Aaron’s little mind was blown.
“He played Crawling and my brain was like, ‘What. Is. Going. On?!’” He says. “I was like, ‘I love this music’ and it just grew from there.” At school, the young James would get kicked out of class and spend his detention getting creative.
“I’d log on to a proxy site on the school computer, listen to The Open Door by Evanescence and set myself a goal: I’m going to write 60 poems by the time the album is over. Then boom, boom, boom,’” he gesticulates. “I’d have pages and pages of these rhymes expressing myself.”
The young poet – who loved Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare – discovered another skill in the playground. “Someone asked me, ‘Can you rap?’ I knew I couldn’t. But my ego took over and I started spitting bars, saying the most random shit ever. And they were like, ‘Yeah, you’re hard.’”
Someone asked me, 'Can you rap?’ I couldn’t but I started spitting bars
Despite the initial dismissal, he decided to keep going. Melding grime and nu metal, Aaron – best known now as his musical alter-ego, Native James – has created a series of furious, revolutionary-minded tunes like the grinding You’re Nothing and the juddering GTFU.
Drawing influence from the likes of Korn’s Jonathan Davis (“He ensnares you with his sound and brings you to this jagged reality – he’s vampiric!”) to Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington (“Chester gives this clean, raw cut of emotional spill”), his music feels like a modern spin on turn-of-the-century nu metal. There’s one influence who stands apart from that however: Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe, who he channels on the howling You’re Nothing.
“When I listened to Blacken The Cursed Sun, I was like, ‘Bro! He’s the one,’” James enthuses. “He influenced me to scream.” Born in Bedford, the James family moved to Ipswich when he was nine. It was a wake-up call. ”In Bedford I’d see other people who looked like me at school,” he recalls. “In Ipswich, I was the only black guy in my class.”
At school, he also experienced racism for the first time. “It was odd to me because I Didn’t know what some of the things [they were saying] meant,” he admits.
With a fire in his belly, he refined his rapping skills and began performing in public with a DJ by his side. Calling himself AJ The Poet, he would freestyle over beats he got from YouTube.
“I would grab the mic and just spray whatever came into my head,” he says. “People would come up to me afterwards and ask, ‘What was that song?’ There would be no song! My mates said, ‘You need to make actual songs, so people can sing them back to you.’”
Aaron began releasing music as Native James in 2021. But after a few releases of lo-fi, downtempo material, James wasn’t happy with the sound he was creating. “I was listening back to a grime EP I made and I thought, ‘Time is ticking,’” he says. “The game doesn’t get younger, it gets older.”
I would grab the mic and just spray whatever came into my head
The turning point came when he was booked for the BBC Radio Introducing Stage at Reading and Leeds Festivals in 2023. It was his first time playing with a band, and helped him find his propulsive style. Commanding the stage, spitting and screaming every line with conviction that’s hard to look away from, he won over an initially disinterested crowd. While it was a massive achievement, he admits while on-stage it’s like he goes into a fugue state.
“’Aaron’ is not on stage with me,” he says with a laugh. “It’s the weirdest thing. I only remember parts of the show. I’ll come off stage and I’ll be like, ‘What did I just do?’”
After scrapping his planned grime EP, Native James released the metal Rebirth EP in September 2024. In October 2025, he released the ambitious Confessions Of A Sinner EP. Conceptualised around the idea of a fallen angel, it channelled the spirit of a 70s prog album, featuring a bombastic, noodling guitar intro and sound collage interludes. Featuring Fallen (a funky song written about the apocalypse), Fire Pon Dem (concerning avenging his enemies) and Pry Away, in which he opens up about his struggles with mental health, it gave listeners as much Aaron James as it did Native James.
As a British man of colour fronting a metal band, he has also become an important figure when it comes to increasing representation on the scene. In 2025, he supported punk rap duo Bob Vylan on tour. He calls out the treatment the band experienced after a controversial anti-Israeli military chant at Glastonbury earlier that year saw them investigated by police and dropped from festival bills, even having their US visas revoked ahead of a tour.
James dubs the actions “bullshit”. “It’s almost as if there is more anger over what they said than the killing of children,” he says. “That to me makes no sense. I stand by Bob Vylan.”
Looking ahead, James hopes to release a debut album in the not too distant future. But he wants time to work on it first. “It needs a concept,” he says. “It needs to be built, it needs to be special. You only get to make a debut album once.”
Sounds Like: Grime and nu metal had a very angry baby
For Fans Of: Linkin Park, Korn, Bob Vylan
Listen To: You’re Nothing
Confessions Of A Sinner is out now via Saviour Music. Native James plays Download Festival in June and 2000 Trees in July
