Ry X was born into the wild. Marooned in Angourie, a tiny island community off Australia’s east coast, he spent his formative years running around naked – clothes weren’t a big deal – swimming, surfing and milking the family’s goats. They’d go days without seeing a car and would be flooded in for weeks at a time when the river rose. Ry has been striving to find that same purity ever since he left home as a grunge-obsessed kid with a surfboard aged 17. ‘Dawn’, his debut album as Ry X, is a sign the search is over.
“It’s been a real journey...” begins Ry, whose path to his current home in Los Angeles’ warehouse district has taken in Costa Rica, Indonesia, Stockholm London and Berlin. His trip began in 2009, when the fresh-faced singer – who, fuelled by his love of Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley and Nirvana had been dabbling in song writing since he was 16 – met a film producer while surfing in Costa Rica. With promises of the rock star dream ringing in his ears, Ry took the producer’s advice and hit Hollywood.
He made and released an album, but the dream quickly died. “I didn’t like the record. I was on the wrong side of the canyon. I thought ‘This is not who I am, I don’t actually enjoy this’,” Ry says.
Suddenly he was back in the water “I didn’t think I would continue making music, I was really perturbed,” he says. Chewed up and spat out by pop music’s machine, Ry’s spirit had been damaged and he was desperate to repair it.
Gnarled by Indonesia, Ry gradually returned to making music, only this time with zero industry influence. He reckons he’d be “a super renegade gypsy surfing the world” if it weren’t for music, and he applied that mindset to his art. Time spent in Europe led him to explore the concrete hues of techno, which resulted firstly in ‘Howling’, a 2012 collaboration with Frank Wiedemann of German electronic duo Ame, and then The Acid, a minimal project with UK DJ Adam Freedland and Californian producer Steve Nalepa.
When he wasn’t sweating in warehouse clubs in the small hours, Ry conceived Ry X and wrote fragile songs built on acoustic guitar, piano and his searching, vocal. Recording to tape and enjoying the hiss it left on his demos, he made the ‘Berlin’ EP in 2013. Its release – initially via Swedish label Dumont Dumont and subsequently on Infectious in the UK – would change everything. A two-minute tearjerker twisted around wispy guitar and his cracked vocal, the title-track drifted out of his insular bubble and onto mainstream radio.
Somehow, a song recorded in a shack found itself nestled next to Rihanna on radio playlists. A track that doesn’t even have a proper chorus has now amassed nearly four million YouTube plays. “It’s an anti-single,” Ry sums up matter-of-factly, “There’s something beautiful about a song like that being on the radio – it’s like a breath [of air]. It hurts my heart to hear it and I couldn’t record it like that again. There’s magic there.”
To stand any chance of getting anywhere near conjuring something similar for the self-produced ‘Dawn’, Ry had to reconnect with his wild side once again. Recreating the dark, Burial-style atmospheres of The Acid’s 2014 album ‘Liminal’ on tour and pin balling between the city and the sea in attempt to satisfy his cravings for both had taken its toll. His usual quick fixes – yoga and surfing – weren’t going to cut it, so he retreated to Topanga Canyon in the hills above Los Angeles. “Ry X is really honest, it’s so much about what feels right,” he explains, “The EP’s success was an accident, so I had to get back to that space of all heart no mind. There's an expectation now, but the music has always led and as soon as you step away from that you're fucked. I had to make sure each song was a beautiful thing.”
Even with overwhelming views, a natural stream to swim in and close proximity to the sea, Ry found that process tough. Working throughout 2015, he recorded 40 tracks before he felt ‘Dawn’ reached its pure state. But the real key to finding ‘Dawn’s’ sound – which, with the shattering climax of tracks like ‘Beacon’ to the teary likes of ‘Hold Me Love,’ – was isolation. “I was hibernating. I thought I’d use all these orchestral arrangements but I was just there next to a fire up in the clouds with an acoustic guitar. I wanted to make it about feeling.”
Although composed in a dense “Patti Smith style, with a lot of definition in a single line”, the record’s lyrics are drawn from that same directness. All but one of its 12 tracks have one-word titles and they’re forcefully evocative: ‘Sweat’, ‘Haste’, ‘Dawn’, ‘Salt’. The minimal arrangements (composed at LA’s Pulse studios with collaborator Jens Kuross) only enhance the songs’ emotional pull, Ry X is unspooling as much of himself as possible. “The meaning may not be explicit sometimes, but that’s because these are whole experiences wrapped into a few words,” he says. “’Sweat’ is about the ghosts of past relationships and choosing between loves... you’re sweating in that situation, just as when you run or hit a boxing bag. That’s emotional sweat.”
Recorded live with only Ry and his guitar, every song on ‘Dawn’ has a threadbare power – the arrangements are stripped back so there’s nothing separating the listener from the songs’ content. “These are live takes, sitting there like Neil Young or Nick Drake used to. It’s about holding tension – any fuck ups got left on so if I’m mumbling that’s how I delivered the vocal in an honest way. You’re really getting the feeling of someone sitting in a room playing the song.”
And that’s the precise feeling Ry felt was unreachable when he washed up in Indonesia. But after nearly six years of searching he’s found it, and says ‘Dawn’ represents the start of everything he wished for first time round. “It’s about continuously making records, look at Bjork, Nils Frahm, Nick Cave or Radiohead, they’ve had success but they’ve found a way to create art and freedom.”
How will he do it? By relying on an entirely different kind of nudity to the one he grew up with: “I’m just being honest. I want to bare my heart and get naked for people…”