Stacey Ryan

With a confident, melismatic delivery and bright vocal tone that complements her playful approach to songwriting, Stacey Ryan's summery R&B-pop deals with love and loneliness. She broke through in 2022 with a viral duet version of her song-in-progress "Don't Text Me When You're Drunk" featuring Zai1k, leading to a deal with Island Records, which quickly offered up a studio version of the social-media duet. Ryan's ebullient debut EP, I Don't Know What Love Is, followed in 2023.

Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Stacey Ryan played trumpet in her school's wind orchestra and jazz band before graduating from high school at age 16. Already determined to make a career in music, she then enrolled in a college jazz program where she studied voice and guitar. Three semesters into a six-term program, she dropped out with a plan to concentrate on building her catalog of original songs; her performances of covers had already garnered her a following on social media. At the tail end of 2021, less than a month after leaving school, she posted an open-verse challenge on TikTok for her song "Don't Text Me When You're Drunk." A submission by teenaged singer/rapper Zai1k (aka Zaire Kelsey) went viral, leading to their inclusion in a New York Times story titled "How Big Can a TikTok Duet Get?" An official studio version of the song issued by Island Records quickly garnered tens of millions of streams. Ryan followed it that May with the perky piano-pop tune "Fall in Love Alone," which crossed the 100 million mark before she presented her debut EP, I Don't Know What Love Is, on Island in April 2023. While it didn't include the breakthrough duet, it did feature "Fall in Love Alone" plus five more original songs. By mid-year, Ryan had toured in support of Joshua Bassett (High School Musical: The Musical: The Series) and landed a slot at the 2023 Montreux Jazz Festival. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi