SIRENS

When Ryan Rickenbach played the last song of his Adelaide EP release show in 2019 at New York’s Bowery Electric, he didn’t predict a seven-year hiatus — or a global pandemic marking the end of an era, one Rickenbach considers his most prolific.

“This isn’t a pandemic record. I didn’t write these songs in isolation. They were written in an intensely creative period of my life that feels almost mythical now. A time when the only avenue for making sense of my experiences was songwriting. And they’ve all been preserved in amber since 2019. It’s time to get them out there.”

Sirens is Rickenbach’s first full-length album, produced by longtime collaborator and friend Cass Dillon. The record is deliberately sparse. Most songs consist of only an acoustic guitar, drums, and bass (the latter two played by Dillon), allowing the lyrics to take center stage via Rickenbach’s sharply resonant baritone. While they may have been ‘preserved in amber’, the album tracks will find a new home as Rickenbach’s first record to be released on vinyl.

“Things seem to be moving at an alarming pace. I see pressing songs to vinyl as an exercise of intention, as a way of saying to the world I believe I’ve made something worthy of existence outside the world of bits.”

Rickenbach considers the album’s title a nod to both Homer and New York, the city he has called home since 2013 and where he met his wife in 2019. They married in 2022 and in 2024 she gave birth to their daughter. Rickenbach now finds himself in a markedly different era — that of fatherhood.

“The album’s title has the luxury of retrospect. These songs tell what happened as I travelled towards a place I would call home.”

As for naming the current era, Rickenbach is content to leave it undefined.

“I’m not trying to ‘make it’ anymore. I’m pressing 100 copies. I hope I can sell them all. And I hope the people who would really enjoy the record get to hear it. So I’ll do my best to make that happen.”