Details The Ruby Suns

Introducing the summery Californian tinged ‘pop’-adelic sounds of The Ruby Suns and their self-titled debut album. Led by sunshine-state native Ryan McPhun they are one of the leading lights of the current crop of new, New Zealand acts causing a stir in the islands’ musical waters.

Ryan fled the alt-pop meanderings of the Southern Californian indie scene to Aotearoa where he discovered that much of the music he liked had survived in a similar fashion to the native large flightless birds, in the absence of natural predators. Ryan explains the move: “All my good musical friends in California were into popular stuff at the time, like metal, hardcore, emo and that sort of crap.  Even though I was in such a huge city, I felt pretty damn out of place. I didn’t meet the right people there. The LA scene is pretty pretentious anyway.  Everybody’s so desperate, so that was a turn off.”

Once in New Zealand Ryan had no such problems and soon found a like-minded group of musicians where, in the traditionally incestuous indie manner, it was obligatory to moonlight in each other’s bands. Hence Ryan was soon to be found drumming with label mates The Brunettes as they toured the US in support of The Shins, while finding time to form his own band, The Ruby Suns.