Ruel talks Phoebe Bridgers-inspired pandemic album: “It was very fucking sad”

His debut album, ‘4th Wall’, is due out in March

Ruel has opened up about a potential future album he wrote during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – separate to his upcoming debut, ‘4th Wall’ – with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley among its primary influences.

The mononymous singer-songwriter spoke to NME Australia for the January 2023 cover story, where he mentioned that, during the informal music industry pause that happened over the bulk of 2020 and 2021, he embraced a side of his artistry that leant closer to emo than his usual soul-pop fare. 

As he explained to writer Josh Martin, he took advantage of the downtime to work on music without the pressures of industry figures, collaborators or deadlines: “It was Jeff Buckley-like, ‘Sketches [For My Sweetheart The Drunk]’-inspired, kind of Phoebe Bridgers, Elliott Smith,” he said. “It was very fucking sad – me on guitar and finding the saddest chords I could find and then whining over them for 45 minutes.”

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Ruel went on to note that although he does hope to release his pandemic album in the future, he opted not to make his debut because it sounds “a little too raw”. Most of ‘4th Wall’, he said, was written in Los Angeles once COVID restrictions were eased. And although it’s not as dour as the scrapped record was, he assured us that sad songs do indeed have a place on it. 

One of those is the album’s final track, ‘End Scene’, a stripped-back number that Ruel compared to the climax of Fight Club: “It’s two people realising it’s the end of something and they’ve felt like they’ve lost their ways of being fun, they stopped enjoying being bad. It’s Bonnie and Clyde. They’ve stopped enjoying committing crime and now they’re just like, ‘What the fuck happened to us? We saw a beautiful end but this is just fucking depressing.’”

Reflecting on the album’s themes as a whole, Ruel said: “I want people to see the mindset I had while writing it. I wrote a lot of really sad songs. And then I was like, ‘OK, how can I find a different energy that [still] isn’t happy?’ I found using the emotion of anger was a cooler way of getting more energy and making it still feel like you can have a good time to it.”

Also revealed was that Ruel kept his admiration for Bridgers intact in making ‘4th Wall’, co-writing with a collaborator of here (Ethan Gruska) and playing a rubber bridge guitar that she did on her ‘Punisher’ album.

‘4th Wall’ will be released on March 3 via RCA and Sony, and has thus far been previewed with five singles: ‘Growing Up Is _____’ in December of 2021, then ‘Let The Grass Grow’ the following March, ‘You Against Yourself’ in August, ‘Someone Else’s Problem’ in October, and ‘Must Be Nice’ earlier this month. Last week, the formermost of those came in at Number 47 on the triple j Hottest 100 of 2022.

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