The Ritzy songs from Chapter 5 and 7 are out now! Support us through bandcamp if you like the songs and wanna support the team. You can buy them through skai or pyr's accounts. Hope you enjoy the music!

It certainly wasn't our intended first release compared to when we first set out building this universe but we ended up having a lot of fun and being very proud of what we made. Two concept songs written and produced by an in-world fictional band in the story, Bernadette's favorite: Ritzy. Now, I'm not going to bore you with the lore details lest your eyes glaze over like Lori's probably did when Bernadette was doing her little fangirl rant in Chapter 5. Instead, I'm just going to talk about the music.

Burning is the first song we ever finished to really solidify Ritzy's sound. Pyr delves into our influences in production in his section below. Meanwhile, I'll speak on the way I approached the lyrics.

I knew what I wanted to create was A-T-M-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.

The song isn't quite a fire but a stray spark that revived a dying flame. I thought of old music videos set in nightclubs with strobe lights bathing the bar in bisexual lighting. Imagery that struck my mind were cigarette smoke, a classy cocktail glass, high heels, tiptoeing, yearning. I wondered about the kind of scene, the kind of world I was going to bring alive before I wrote the lyrics.

Afterwards, I sat in front of my keyboard, wrote it, then recorded the demo. Pyr took it from there, like he always does when he does his magic.

So the very first thing that started the creation of this track was Skai sending me a demo of her singing the track accompanied by the piano. It was a pretty rough recording - she was only playing the chords, but she had a very interesting riff going at the start. I then transformed it to this guitar-distorted synth that sparked and set the mood for the production of the whole track. 

The sound of Ritzy as conceptualized by me and Skai (mostly Skai) was this guy Abel, who is supposed to be this prolific producer in the 2020s that started off his career by being the pianist and the main producer in the band (which is Ritzy) in the early 2010s. We bounced off this idea by making Abel being really inspired by the electronic sounds in the 80s - we actually have made a Spotify playlist of songs that he probably would listen to. We thought it would be nice if the band would eventually go on to make three albums, which meant that these albums had sounds and eras as well.

We thought that Burning could be the single that propelled them into the mainstream scene - charting and selling out venues and all that. RItzy is predominantly an electronic band, so aside from me listening to that Abel Spotify playlist I mentioned earlier, I was also listening to a lot of my favorite electronic bands that were "Abel-adjacent" so to speak. Bands like CHVRCHES, The Midnight, NERO. This was also the time when Skai was trying to get me to listen to PVRIS and Cannons, so they definitely made an influence as well. 

There are a lot of things that I decided on that were based on me listening to these influences - stuff like the guitar-amped synth, the heavily processed bass guitar, some small stereo processing on the vocals. One specific detail I really liked is the door closing sound effect during the second chorus. Since the song was about a rekindling of a relationship by means of a one night stand, I had the idea of adding that sound effect to hammer home the idea of them... hammering.

When we finally finished Burning, we couldn't stop listening to it. Literally. Every time we got on a discord call, we would just play it using a music bot and loop it. It was really nice to start a track from a concept and execute it well (in my own personal opinion). One of my favorite moments in the track that I'd like to share is the echoed out vocals by the end of the track. The roomy, intense, intimate atmosphere that makes is just satisfying to listen to.

I neglected to mention above that I play guitar better than I play the keyboard. Actually, I can barely play the keyboard well at all but I do find myself trying. Sometimes, one needs a change in perspective, maybe a different atmosphere, a different instrument to bring a concept of a song alive. It's especially important if you want the song to sound nothing like your own signature and more like the signature of a certain era of a fictional band.

That being said, Bad Luck Boys needed to sound different from Burning because it was from another album, another era of the Ritzy brand. I had to find a way to shift my mindset again so I can write a song that's in the same ballpark as the first but vastly different in feeling. I ended up singing into a shitty mic and recording something that sounded like shit lol.

But Pyr salvaged it, as he always does. HAHA!

Another cute thing I'd like to mention too is that Bad Luck Boys wouldn't have even existed so soon if Jinn didn't come into out dev chat one day and said she wanted to name Chapter 5 Bad Luck Boys and she wanted a song called Bad Luck Boys with it. I thought it was fun so I obliged.

Personally, I really enjoy the freedom Pyr and I had while we were working on this song. This was the first time I didn't have a complete demo before he finished the structure. It was a fun experience to improvise based on his ideas rather than work within the framework of my own. It was also extra fun because he was at my house for the majority of the time that we did work on this song.

Bad Luck Boys started similarly. I listened to the demo Skai gave me, and I focused on the initial riff she sang. I thought "Hey, that's a good idea for the synth riff". I copied it, made it into a distorted, amped synth. When I then played it back over and over I thought it lacked some oomph. Some power.

We planned Ritzy to have a third album named Vice, and we conceptualized it to be something that gives off a celebratory sound. Something commercially palatable than the dark, brooding sound that their self-titled album had. Since Vice was also the last Ritzy album before their break up (yes, they will break up,) I imagined that Abel would also feel distant about the album. Ritzy would become really big and acclaimed at this time, but Abel wouldn't like the direction that they were headed. 

With that in mind, I incorporated some sounds that would make it less Abel-centric and more band-centric. Skai suggested that I make the drums busier and more prominent. I added a more noticeable layer of guitars. I think the end product really solidified the sound of Vice, and by extension Ritzy as a band.

Going back to the riff, I decided to record a couple takes of me singing it, similar to a crowd chant. I think this gave it the power it was missing, and it really defined that celebratory sound I was looking for. Skai did the same and recorded a couple takes, plus she thought of screaming "Bad Luck Boys" as adlibs, and I thought it was really, really fitting for the mood.