A TON OF COLOURS is Ryan Downey’s “love letter to the beauty of emotional expression and communication”

Melbourne’s Ryan Downey‘s luminous art-rock album A TON OF COLOURS is about humanness – its beauty, its contradictions, and our desire for connection. It is a love letter to the beauty of emotional expression and communication, with love being the conduit for this joy of self-expression. There’s a soul-sharing vulnerability throughout, found in the aching longing of ‘Contact’ (“If I can’t be touched right now, then I need your love”), the exploration of intoxicating all-consuming love in ‘Sors De Ma Tête’ (“No freedom from dreaming with your eyes on the back of my eyes”), and in the introspective ‘Half Light’ which lays bare feelings of fear and inadequacy (“Fear, you will not own me, but I don’t want to be lonely, I just want to see half-light in full flight”).

Love is presented on A TON OF COLOURS as the multifaceted, visceral and galvanising beast it often is, and musically the record mirrors this in its sonic spectrum – from the chaotic to the delicate …The former found in the anthemic first single ‘Heart Is An Onion’, and the latter found in songs like the gently expanding cascade of ‘Patterns’, and somewhere in-between in the lurching rhythms and minimalist buzz of ‘Same Dream, Every Night’. It heaves, flickers, and radiates with a powerful tenderness. It’s open, adventurous and wants to take you with it.

A TON OF COLOURS was written and performed by Ryan Downey on vocals, guitars, keys, synths, beats, percussion, with additional instrumentation from Jesse Glass (drums, piano and additional percussion) and Nicolas Roder (bass, Moog). The album was recorded in 2020 at Soundpark Studios, Northcote, Australia. It was produced, engineered, and mixed by Burke Reid, and mastered by Guy Davie at Electric Mastering, London UK.

A TON OF COLOURS follows the release of Ryan’s debut album Running (2018, Barely Dressed Records), which saw him nominated for an Australian Music Prize and play a string of headline shows in Australia, as well as being invited to open for support tours across Australia and Europe for artists like Middle Kids, Marlon Williams, Sarah Blasko and Emma Louise.

Purchase / Stream / Download A TON OF COLOURS: https://ryandowney.lnk.to/atonofcolours