THE BREAKDOWN: THE DEBUT EP FROM RIO RAINZ [@RIORAINZ], ‘COBWEBS IN MY ROOM’

19-year old Rio Rainz is East London’s latest alternative gem. His music feels like a collection of journal entries brought to life by atmospheric production and his London-bred cadence. His latest offering boasts an array of sounds and emotions, pulling from different genres to create an eclectic mix.

on ‘cobwebs in my room’

The project was constructed purely just from my life experiences. I took a little break in writing and articulating stuff generally, and I wanted to just go experience a load of stuff and put myself in places that I wouldn’t [have] necessarily put myself in before. During that time, I feel like I just learned a lot of different things that I was writing about in the time and to be quite honest with you, with writing this project, I didn’t set a motif to say like, “Okay, I’m gonna start writing an EP,” I was writing songs in a period of time that all cohesively made sense to what was going on and also feels like me, so it’s all relatively true to my experiences. 

favourite girl

I just felt romantic one day – I like to label myself hopelessly romantic – I was just feeling like a certain way that day. I’ve been meaning to go with my girlfriend to Amsterdam for a while and then ended up going – didn’t go with my girlfriend – actually went with some friends, but I stayed on a boat, on a canal, in Amsterdam, which is like “cycle city”, everyone’s cycling, it’s crazy. I went out there two weeks before the song was coming out, so it definitely tunes into what I’m talking about – going to Amsterdam.

The track came out in March, it was really cool because it was a song that I’d made [at] the start of last year. I just sat on that track and a lot of my friends [and] a lot of people that I knew weren’t really taking it in, the way that I had believed in it, but although I had that narrative from loads of different people, I was like, “You know what? I really do love this song,” so I put it on TikTok and everyone loved it, there was a spark that ignited. From there I just kept consistently making cool videos from where I’m from, which alternates from the countryside to East London.

dancing in the dark

‘dancing in dark’ spotlights compatibility between two people and it’s more so that it’s not spotlighted – two individual people, sharing completely different experiences in life, but then also equally sharing moments together, intimate moments where we could still be dancing in the dark, that is the whole concept. Nothing is established within it, I’m generally talking, so it’s what you depict from it. It’s not exposed to everyone, it’s two people who are sharing this moment, but you don’t know really where it’s going. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions. It’s doing these things like I talk about in ‘favourite girl’ – taking these trips. The first lyric in the song is “Drown in the cup / Got us both moving slo mo,” so it also focuses on these intimate moments.

the kid

I was actually chilling with my family in Edmonton when I started this concept of ‘the kid’, I’ve got a little cousin called Lorenzo – he’s a little identical Rio, a little version of me and I was contemplating, if we’re looking at my life being Z now or like A, B, or C when I was Lorenzo’s age, I was just thinking [about] the evolution of my life, or things that have happened in my life, or just being around so many different people. I was trying to think about when watching a kid, I’m always so paranoid. “I’m watching the news,” there’s also an arrogance and ignorance in that as well through certain things that I’ve experienced as a kid, and you can hear it in the verses – being straight up, to the point. I’m talking on real experiences that are so different, if you was to listen to a ballad by me.

nirvana

It’s in the same aura of a feeling – I went to the studio that day and I just wrote that. A lot of the time when I go studio, I don’t write. I just go there and hear something and feel something. I can relate it to me feeling like I have different layers to my personality, feel like it flips between this introverted feel to extroverted throughout the whole project. This is one of the more intimate or introverted moments compared to ‘sunshine’ which is completely extroverted. I feel like my personality is always changing and that’s why my music is quite genre fluid.

brand new whip (demo)

I made this song in a hypothetical state, when I was losing my ego. I like to study psychology in my own time and I realized that a lot of people are attached to the egotistical mind, but when you realize that you’re just the same as anyone else. A lyric I wrote was like, “I’m a love narcissist,” but it’s a sad tune – you could relatively compare it to a mellow, sad song, but I feel like that’s a more internal feeling I felt in that period of time when I was writing. And I also started driving as well [which] correlates to the title of the song.

sunshine feat. finn foxell

This one is definitely feels different to all of the other songs and I feel like generally the whole project is a rollercoaster and that correlates to me feeling different things when writing it, but this is a lot more up-tempo. This is not something that I actually imagined myself putting out or working with Finn on, I didn’t know Finn Foxell personally until this song. We made this song, I made it with my friend, Dom [Valentino] – he also works with Finn. He played Finn the song and Dom was like, “Finn wants to jump on it,” that was four months after we created the song. And then a lot later down the line, Finn hit me up and was like, “You know what, I really want to lay something [down], I’ve got a few ideas.”

He came to the session, we all went there together. Finn just sat there, was silent for like 10 minutes, just listening to it, and wrote it within that 10 minutes and laid it down, and that’s what’s on the song.

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