The Ruby Suns

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Auckland, New Zealand (2004 – present)

‘Fight Softly’ is the third album by New Zealand’s pop masters The Ruby Suns. Ryan McPhun (their prime mover) has the kind of voracious musical mind that cites as equal influences ’80s/’90s New Jack Swing and modern Angolan kuduro, Fleetwood Mac and Britney Spears, Brazilian tropicalia and Argentinean cumbia. He’s the kind of diligent, meticulous soul that spends days hunched over a laptop in a tiny rented studio in Auckland, NZ just to perfect a sequenced drum track (mission accomplished). And Fight Softly is the kind of head-spinning combination of big-picture vision and sumptuous detail that only comes from an artist with an urgent need to express all the stuff he’s seen. And you can dance to it!

California-born (and NZ citizen) McPhun took childhood trips to New Zealand and finally made Auckland home in 2003. Though he soon started playing with Kiwi indie darlings The Brunettes, he’d been making his own music for years—four-track bedroom stuff that mixed his faraway vocals with effects-laden guitar, synths, and all manner of field-recorded samples. With his own new band, Ryan McPhun and The Ruby Suns, McPhun recorded and released his first album for NZ label Lil’ Chief Records. By the time its follow-up, Sea Lion, was ready, the foreshortened Ruby Suns had gained a college following in New Zealand and toured Australia with The Shins and the UK with Field Music, among others. The album came out on Sub Pop in early 2008 and landed on various best-of lists that year.
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  • Colton56

    If anyone has any of their stuff in 320 please let me know!

    yesterday morning
  • Pi_Puppids

    What a sunsplashed sound. =)

    January 2012
  • Sonicjr01

    Cinco !!!

    January 2012
  • FeelinZazzy

    your size and color capture my imagination

    October 2011
  • StephPotato

    sounds like something id use in a sick cartoon

    July 2011
  • kataklyzmik

    There's nothing about this music that I don't like...

    July 2011
  • dwarves

    please make a new album

    April 2011
  • novembercold

    THERE ARE BIRDS

    April 2011
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