Ryn Weaver looks like becoming half a decent pop star doesn’t she? She’s not fully there yet though. For starters you really have to be idolised by a significant number of fans before the star status is achieved and secondly you have to re-shape the pop star template just enough to make it your own. So whilst Ryn works on that can we all agree that what she definitely has are some way more than half decent songs? The Fool is one of those songs. We’ve streamed it before on Breaking More Waves, but now it has a slightly surreal video that has a cute fluffy bunny, a man pretending to be some sort of superhero (he’s pretty rubbish to be honest), some slow motion, some cows and some weird watery witchcraft. Your guess is as good as ours as to whether it means anything or not – possibly something about the different stages of a relationship? In extra news, you might remember we hinted in our last post that Ryn was playing her first UK show on Wed 3rd June and we were gunning for it to be at the Adelphi Club in Hull. Well, inevitably the inevitable has happened and instead Ryn is playing for New Shapes at Notting Hill Arts Club, London alongside Scotland’s Kloë. Sorry Hull. Ryn Weaver - The Fool (Video)
One of Breaking More Waves’ Ones To Watch 2015, Ryn Weaver got in to a bit of trouble the other day when she was accused of throwing shade at Beyonce (here), even though she quickly deleted the tweet and affirmed her love for Queen Bey. It seems that these days the internet has decreed that it is not acceptable to even question anything about Mrs Knowles-Carter – possibly a dangerous thing? Thankfully there’s no trouble or question with Weaver’s latest song*, a taster from what we can expect from her debut album, released in June via Mad Love / Interscope (in the USA at least). This one has a real ‘moment’ just after the three minute mark, trust us. The Fool (which is the title track from the long-player) ticks and links all the pop boxes marked Passion Pit and Marina & The Diamonds (a good thing). Ryn’s also playing her debut UK show on June 3rd (full details still to be announced), which will inevitably be in London, because that’s how the music industry works; but wouldn’t it be fantastic if she decided instead to debut at Exeter’s Cavern or maybe the Adelphi Club in Hull? *Footnote – we’d normally stream via Soundcloud, where there isn't a visual to watch on You Tube, because Hype Machine would pick up the track and there’s the possibility for a lot more people to hear the song using that mechanism, but alas her label has uploaded a 1 minute 30 second snippet of The Fool to Soundcloud rather than the full version on You Tube, which is a bit useless to everyone really. Ryn Weaver - The Fool
Having gate crashed the internet this summer with OctaHate, Ryn Weaver got a number of music commentators on the world wide web pretty worked up. Why? Because it seemed there was some serious industry backing in the promotion of the song. Benny Blanco, Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos and Cashmere Cat produced the track, Charli XCX co-wrote it and the likes of Jessie Ware, Hayley Williams and Tom Krell of How To Dress Well all quickly tweeted about it shortly after it was released. The words “manufactured pop act,” were the words that came to many minds, a concept that here at Breaking More Waves we couldn’t care less about . We’re don’t carry the same mindset as Nottingham singer Jake Bugg, who once told The Sunday Times "Manufactured pop bands, they don't have any heart, they don't have any soul. It's really sad for me, when you work hard at what you do with your guitar, and then you pop the radio on and it's like some weird trumping sound coming out of it.” This of course was said by a man who doesn’t even use his real name to perform under and whose debut album was co-written with a number of hired co-writers, including one who has written Kylie Minogue and Liberty X. Maybe we need to have a conversation about the word manufactured Jake. Our point is this. In this day and age arguing about the process of manufacturing and authenticity in rock and pop is a bit silly. Pop has always been about collaboration. Even the most ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ band will often use an engineer and / or producer in the studio to help them create the best recorded sound – this in itself is a manufacturing process. What is so inherently bad about collaboration? Any artist that thinks that they have all the talent themselves and don’t need help from others has a very high self-deluded opinion of themselves or really are bloody good. Some are good singers, some good song-writers, some good performers, some good producers. But very few are all of these on their own. So we come back to Ryn Weaver. Her debut EP was the product of many talents. It was that collaboration that produced a recording of quality pop. But one excellent EP is very different to a brilliant album or a long term career. It’s why Ryn Weaver has to be One to Watch in 2015, can she (and whoever she works with) deliver the goods time and time again? Time will tell. Ryn Weaver - OctaHate (Video)
Having previously collaborated with Chance The Rapper as well as Jessie Ware now New York via Osaka duo BenZel deliver a new tune with rising pop lady Ryn Weaver, taken from their EP Men. The EP also includes a track featuring Cashmere Cat. This one was pushed out a couple of days ago and has already found itself whirring around the blogosphere like a tornado. It’s one of those productions that the cool kids would probably say was ‘siiiiiiiiick’ but we have a problem comparing music to vomit, so instead we’ll say that it’s a big glossy modern in your face production with lots of electronic stabs and cartoonish samples, with Ryn’s vocal giving it a softer edge. Benzel - Touch ft Ryn Weaver
The internet is weird isn’t it? It can change your perception of reality. After all if (like us) you follow very few people on Twitter (162 to be exact) and 20 of them tweet about the same subject it must be important, right? Irrespective of the fact that there are millions of people in the world who probably couldn’t give a flying fig about it. Your window on the world can be so easily distorted by what you choose to consume on the web and what you choose to see can be so easily altered and filtered b your own preferences.
Looking through our window Ryn Weaver is already a huge pop star. After all, probably 50% of the chosen 162 have tweeted about her, and she’s already had a bucket load of plays on Soundcloud for OctaHate and Promises. So surely she must be massive? Rather like the time we went to see a band who had already had two top 10 hits on blog aggregator Hype Machine and twenty people turned up to see them play live. That's probably happened more than once. What we’re trying to say is that these days it’s very difficult to judge who is genuinely adored by the masses and who is just an internet 'like' click and then forgotten. Ryn has certainly made a good start at heading towards pop stardom with her Promises EP, which in summary is four very good pop songs (yes, we weren’t impressed with OctaHate at first but damn, it’s got us now). So to celebrate the good pop we’re streaming another tune. Stay Low is modern, glistening and immaculately produced. Yet at the time of writing (quite a few hours before you see this post) has just over 1,000 plays on Soundcloud. Maybe Ryn still has some way to go before the rest of the world is looking through the same window that we are. Ryn Weaver - Stay Low
It doesn’t take a genius to suss that there’s some serious industry backing going on with Ryn Weaver. From the moment her debut song OctaHate was uploaded to Soundcloud the likes of Jessie Ware, Hayley Williams and Charli XCX were to be found tweeting about it and Atlantic records then confirmed that Charli XCX had been involved in the writing of the song. OctaHate went on to grab something in the region of 100,000 plays on Soundcloud in its first 24 hours and has now exceeded 1 million plays in just over a month. However, we didn’t feature OctaHate on Breaking More Waves. Not because of some indie minded philosophy about not featuring major label artists or a lack of awareness of her name, but because we didn’t particularly care for the track. Now comes a second offering produced by Passion Pit and Benny Blanco. It’s called Promises and it sounds like all the most accessible bits of modern pop music blended up for just under 4 minutes. If you’re a fan of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift etc then you might as well accept that you’re probably going to spend a lot of time listening to Promises. If Radio 1 don’t playlist this in the UK then something is seriously wrong. The chorus is vast. So who is Ryn Weaver? We’re not sure if that’s her real name or not. The internet seems to suggest she may have also recorded under the name Aryn Wuthrich and has also tried her hand at acting. The story seems to be that she met Benny Blanco (he’s written for Jessie J, Katy Perry, Britney etc and collaborated with the likes of Bruno Mars and Nicki Minaj) at a party and ‘showed him my Soundcloud’ and things took off from there. See that’s how easy it is kids. Write some music and just go and stalk out Benny Blanco at a party. Now why don’t we get invited to parties like that? Maybe it’s because we’ve never recorded anything on Soundcloud, unless you count our little bit of foolery on April 1st this year of course. Promises is quite possibly the most commercial sounding song we’ve posted on Breaking More Waves this year. Maybe next we’ll post some Croatian thrash metal just to even things out? Ryn Weaver - Promises
