Ryan Hemsworth’s 2014 release, Alone for the First Time, maintains his trademark eight-bit, intimate bedroom electronica that fans have come to love, while simultaneously painting a more personal picture of the artist than previous releases.
Winning Electronic Album of the Year at the Juno Awards in April has not affected Hemsworth’s style. “The Juno has helped with regards to recognition, but the music itself is not reflected by it so to speak,” Ryan says over the phone on a quiet morning in Toronto. As the album opener, “Hurt Me,” begins with a lovely synth-string melody that reflects those sentimental soundtracks of video games like Final Fantasy, you find yourself immediately pulled into a space that is simultaneously wondrous, yet lonely and somber. Fans will find it a lot quieter than his previously R&B, pop-melody inspired Guilt Trips, and frankly, that is not a bad thing.
As the glockenspiel and xylophone samples drive over sustained fuzz synths in tracks like “Snow In Newark” and “Blemish,” there is a sense of self-reflective comfort that could be equaled to wrapping yourself up in a blanket on a cold winter day. Aside from the vulnerable voice chorus’ that plead for lost love in “Walk Me Home” and “Surrounded,” Hemsworh is capable of producing a surprisingly humanistic feel that tends to be difficult to find in electronic music.
“Other than the fact that this album was mostly produced by myself in dark hotel rooms, I try to add some live instrumentation in to add that humanistic quality — the guitar in ‘Blemish’ was me playing guitar and some of the drum samples are complicated pieces of a live drum kit that I’ll mesh together,” explained Hemsworth.
The lonely, vulnerable aesthetic of Alone for the First Time is ironically unexpected. Winning a Juno Award is arguably the Canadian equivalent of winning a Grammy, which any young, up and coming artist would likely desire to reflect on in their following album. However, these potentially boastful, “lean-towards-the-masses” undertones are significantly absent in Alone for the First Time.
“Becoming the biggest artist in the world is not really a goal to me as much as it is to make my own work, and I get how people could react to this based on circumstance, but it’s just not something I really think about,” said Hemsworth. The album does not intend to go against this recognition, but rather acts as an ineffectual nod to the circumstances that may naturally be forgotten as time goes on.
Alone for the First Time proves that Ryan Hemsworth is still the awkward, vulnerable artist that fans have grown to love for his nostalgically warm, bedroom electronica. However, listeners will inevitably leave Alone for the First Time with a feeling that is equivalent to discovering a deer in the forest that flees before you even get to know what it’s truly all about.
