RYD Limited Vinyl LP

RYD SELF TITLED Limited Vinyl LP

Overview:

The internet is a place to explore and to escape, but it's also an arena to become lost in. It's a mirror, but it also distorts. For producer and songwriter RYD, it's a means of communication, but it's also a way of shutting conversation down. Opaque electronics matched to heart-rending songwriting, bleached out digital production underpinning the most poignant of vocals, RYD's debut album is a work of solitary creativity that is constantly in flux. The album follows RYD's 2017 EP, Now There's Nowhere, an astonishing viral success that has amassed over 1 million streams on Spotify alone. "It was kind of therapy for me," he says of the EP, a work tied to the agonising dissolution of a toxic relationship. "I turned to music to not think about. Writing that EP gave me closure, I guess. That's how it's been for me musically… I need to write about it in order to let those feelings out. That's kind of how I transfer my thoughts on to a page, so to speak." Inspired by the frankness of Bon Iver's work, and the more experimental wing of 90s R&B - think Timbaland, The Neptunes, Missy Elliot - RYD's classical upbringing and fondness for jazz composition all come to the fore on his intoxicating blend of beautiful melody. He works from him, pushing his minimal set up to the brink. "Obviously home is where you're most comfortable," he explains, "so I guess I can open up as much as I want, or as little as I want, in the privacy of my own home. It is a good place to write. To go in certain places." RYD's debut album was made in this fashion. Self-titled, it's ruthlessly honest and impeccably inventive; music as therapy, where the work itself becomes so entwined with one person's life that context becomes meaningless, and the content becomes strikingly universal.

Featured Tracks:

1. Don't
2. Work It Out
3. I See U
4. Plans
5. Away
6. Could've Been
7. You Only Had to Look Back
8. Leaves
9. Holding Back
10. Retain