William Ryan Key has released his latest single, “Brighton” today on Equal Vision Records. Taken from his third EP, Everything Except Desire , out February 11th, the airy and textural track pushes Key a little further left from his past duties as Yellowcard vocalist and rhythm guitarist. “I wondered if it was too far removed from the music people expect to hear from me,” he expresses. “The more I pondered it, the more I realized that it might be, and that it was ok if it was.”
Fans can pre-order and pre-save Everything Except Desire now HERE.
Exploring different genres and instrumentals on Everything Except Desire, Key’s deep dive into the cinematic and conceptual music world offers a new palette for him to explore. It’s a deeply personal record (the EP tackles such heavy topics as his own mental health and expunging emotional toxicity), he explains, “I wanted to figure out why I let things happen to me. I allowed myself to be vulnerable for the wrong reasons, and I needed to understand that.”
Conceived and produced by Key on a month-to-month basis through Patreon at the start of Summer 2020, he reached out to friends Ryan Mendez, Erich Talaba, and Mike Kalajian to help in the recording of the record. The result is an EP that isn’t as much an extension of his previous two critically-hailed EPs Thirteen and Virtue as it is a progression forward. “I took a risk and created something completely unlike anything I’ve released in the past,” he beams. “This record felt like a big step for me both as a writer and a producer.”