Meet the latest addition to the VMP Rising family, Los Angeles musician boylife.
Ryan Yoo has spent the past four or five years laboring patiently and candidly in a sort of flow, channeling his experiences — “chasing my spark,” as he calls it — into what would become a self-portrait, and his debut album gelato. It’s modern R&B, inflected with hip-hop, soul and most notably, his constant barrage of emotional honesty, all funneled through string arrangements and lush harmony that have the power to create a reflective breed of spiritual surround sound within listeners.
“Gelato is delicious. You have to eat it before it's fully melted, while it holds its shape. For some reason, that became the ultimate metaphor for each of these things that I've been living,” he remarked on the title in an interview with VMP. “The first song says, ‘It'll all melt away like gelato.’ That's my version of saying the classic phrase, ‘This too shall pass.’ With that in mind, it was important to capture each of these moments as I was living them in as honest and direct a way as possible. Because they’re moments, and they're going to pass. And before they do, I want to make sure that I was present for them.”