Ripe

Ripe remembers sweating to hell in a basement underneath a Subway sandwich shop, building their very first songs in a concrete cube that smelled like fresh bread. They remember selling their first tickets by hand outside the coffee shop that their friends worked at, holding court like twenty-something impresarios trying to move like 50 tickets to a bar that was willing to let you keep the ticket sales if they kept the bar.

In a world where we constantly feel the loving pressure to “tell our story”, where so many of our friends that have found success as artists have done it alone, Ripe is using their bio to tell you that at the center of everything is collaboration and community, a friendship that has become a bond as strong as family, a constantly spinning object that cannot be properly captured by any single still photograph.

This moment, the two songs already out and the new songs coming, catches the band in a moment of intense joyous swelling energy. Working in dream studios, in a city they spent years trying to take a proper chance on, with a producer that had made albums we loved in our formative years, alongside the closest musical relations we’ve formed. This is our love letter to complicated nostalgia, to relentless empowering change, to realizing that making dreams come true (just like a crisis) only fully makes sense when it is shared.

Joy in the wild unknown let us tell you who we were. Bright blues had us ripped apart so we could start again. What comes next is the band swinging for the fences, all in at the table, risking everything for a shot at feeling connected to you.

10th, 2023 release date. The tour will hit prestigious venues such as MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, Terminal 5 in New York City and The Fillmore in San Francisco.

Even before the pandemic, Ripe was on the cusp of something new. The band began drawing acclaim from the likes of the Boston Globe, Huffington Post and WXPN with a dance-ready vibe on EPs Produce The Juice and Hey Hello. Ripe built on that sound and folded in a touch of R&B on their first full-length, Joy in the Wild Unknown. Their streams on Spotify surged past 65 million, they conquered stages at festivals including Bonnaroo, Firefly, SweetWater and Bottlerock, and they sold thousands of tickets across the US, including sell outs at iconic venues like House of Blues Boston and Brooklyn Steel. Ripe was still ready to try a different approach for Bright Blues. The album would already be different in that it would be their first release after signing to indie powerhouse Glassnote Records. They started the creative process by calling in outside producer Paul Butler (St. Paul & the Broken Bones, Michael Kiwanuka) and for the first time, bringing in co-writers, recording four songs that Ripe released as singles throughout 2020.

“We thought, how can we do something new?” Hellerman says. “Something that still has our sound and vibe at its core, how can we expand our boundaries and reach more audiences while still staying true to what makes Ripe Ripe?” The answer was teaming up with Noah Conrad (BTS, Niall Horan) and Ryan Linvill (Olivia Rodrigo, Dermot Kennedy), classmates from Berklee who are up-and-comers in the world of pop songwriting and production. Together, the band and its collaborators dialed in a buoyant sound on the hooky album opener “Get Over,” where synths help flesh out a throwback pop sound. Ripe works a hot soul vein on “All or Nothing,” where horns punctuate a snappy rhythm that powers smooth, fully self-assured vocals. Woozy synths on “Paper Cups” help create a dream-like vibe accentuated with a subtle, hypnotic melody.

Bringing new people into the fold, even though they’re old friends, was an exercise in trust that proved well worth it. “We used to just all get in a room and kind of hash it out,” Becker says. With Bright Blues, “It was only one or two of us at a time with Noah and Ryan, so our individual voices got to shine more.”

The new approach also helped Ripe think of the band’s high-energy, freewheeling stage show separately from the recording studio, which they used more as an instrument in the making of Bright Blues. Wulfsohn chimes in, “There are moments of improvisation on the record that feel like somebody was just going for it and hitting something really exciting. I’m biased, but I think you hear every distinct voice across the record, and I think the circumstances of the record absolutely leaked into the musical choices.”

The result is an album that shows the full scope of the band’s abilities as writers and performers. The live show has always been at the core of who Ripe is, and now the recorded music can stand alongside it as an all-encompassing representation of who the band is and where they are going.

Bright Blues also showed the members of Ripe that they can still surprise each other. “Each of us had moments while making this album that really resonated with us, if not broke us open emotionally,” Barthel says. “Having that experience coming from people who you know better than anybody else and trust so much is pretty mind blowing. It definitely left us all with a new level of inspiration and drive and belief in what we could all do.”