With the release of her first full-length album on the horizon, Eddy Lee Ryder unveils her newest single, “Bad Decisions,” which is coincidentally the birthday of the heartbreaker who inspired the tune. Synthesizing timeless songcraft, dramatic introspection, and infinite pop smarts to create a breathtaking song cycle of apocalyptic romance and anxious regret, badly broken hearts, and wishful hope for the future, Sweet Delusions will be available everywhere soon. (One In A Million Media, 2024)

Quirky and charming while still precise and powerfully personal, Sweet Delusions reveals the self-described “demented pop” chanteuse as a one-of-a-kind new artist, her unabashed heartache and beguiling humor completely her own yet as identifiable and real as any of our own. Penned and performed with uncommon brio and invention, the album sees Ryder musing on lust, longing, and lost love across shimmering choruses and a vertiginous undercurrent of contemplative melancholy, turning her raw pain into expertly wrought anthems that simultaneously hearken back to both truck stop jukeboxes and glittering art deco cafés.

Having earned applause for her sadly beautiful portraits of love and life on the margins, with songs like “Smoke and Mirrors” featured in the cult hit horror film Terrifier 2, Ryder set to work on her long-brewing debut album in 2022, collaborating with producer Dave Cerminara between his studio in LA and the Outlier Inn in New York’s southern Catskill Mountains.

Once Ryder hit the studio, armed with a cache of songs inspired by “an extremely bad ending with someone who was my best friend,” her apocalyptic romanticism naturally led to the album’s “accidental country” sound, a rhinestone-flecked bed of twangy guitars, languid bass, and irresistible melodies created with accompaniment from longtime Father John Misty drummer/musical director Dan Bailey, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Chae, pedal steel player Rich Hinman, and keyboardists Todd Caldwell, and Dave Shephard, along with harmonies and other help from NYC friends like pianist Abby Payne and Rebecca Haviland.

Despite her love of guise and character, the clear through line that unifies Ryder’s still evolving body of work is her storyteller’s gift for cutting to the quick of her own complex, unconventional nature. Impossible to pigeonhole, with Sweet Delusions, Eddy Lee Ryder proudly avoids being fitted into any particular category or genre, her creative adventurousness and tongue-in-cheek humor distinctly and undeniably her own.

“I don’t how to not write from a personal perspective. How do you sit down and write something that’s only surface?” – Eddy Lee Ryder