RILEY! have released their new EP To Live And Die In The American South out now, via Pure Noise Records. The band have released the emotive 73 Summers – a tribute to the passing of a loved one.
“This is a tough one to talk about. I wrote this song around the 10-year mark of my grandfather’s passing,” says Ryan Bluhm. “Being young and starting college and just generally being busy all the time with real life starting, I didn’t notice anything wrong, and I guess I’m not sure if anyone really did. Depression is a quiet killer. When he took his own life, I had no understanding of how to process going forward. He helped raise me after all. Growing up with a single mom, he almost felt like my father, too.
Most of this song surrounds all the questions I wish I could ask now, even if they’re not anything that can realistically be answered at all. Without going into more of a trauma dump than this already has been, this song just felt right as a closer on a record. A lot of the music was meticulously decided for that purpose: the soft, lulling beginning that builds up into a massive wall of sound that fades out into nonexistence. The piano note that repeats over and over at the end of the song was meant to almost emulate a heartbeat that just abruptly quits, which also signifies the record coming to an end.”
