Stacey Ryan

Stacey Ryan pairs an assured, florid vocal style and luminous timbre with whimsical songwriting that explores romance and solitude. Her airy fusion of R&B and pop surfaced in 2022 when a widely circulated duet-in-progress of “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk” with Zai1k prompted Island Records to sign her and issue an official studio cut of the social-media collaboration. Her buoyant first EP, I Don’t Know What Love Is, appeared in 2023.

Raised in Montreal, Canada, Stacey Ryan performed on trumpet in her school’s wind orchestra and jazz band before finishing high school at age 16. Intent on a music career, she entered a college jazz curriculum to study voice and guitar. Three semesters into the six-term course she withdrew in order to focus on original material, having already drawn an online audience through cover performances. Late in 2021, less than a month after leaving school, she launched an open-verse TikTok challenge for “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk.” A clip submitted by teenage singer-rapper Zai1k (Zaire Kelsey) spread rapidly and earned them a feature in the New York Times article “How Big Can a TikTok Duet Get?” Island Records released an authorized studio version that soon accumulated tens of millions of streams. That May she issued the buoyant piano-pop track “Fall in Love Alone,” which passed the 100-million-stream threshold before her debut EP, I Don’t Know What Love Is, arrived on Island in April 2023. Although the breakthrough duet was omitted, the set contained “Fall in Love Alone” and five further originals. By mid-year Ryan had opened for Joshua Bassett (High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) and appeared at the 2023 Montreux Jazz Festival.