We have been waiting for this to drop, From Tiktok to real life Stacey Ryan Don't Text Me When You're Drunk is out
Today Stacey Ryan, 21-year old Montreal singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, shares the official video for her song “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk,” a collaboration with Zai1k, that exclusively premiered on Facebook before being released everywhere today. What started as an open-verse TikTok trend that was praised by The New York Times led to Stacey garnering millions of streams on her now debut single and led to her signing with Island Records. The video for “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk,” captures the vibe of the song perfectly by emulating how the song was created — showing both Stacey and Zai1k recording in different locations before a grand reveal at the end.
“Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk,” is Stacey’s deeply personal account of an all-too-common dating experience. The track is a sparkling piece of soul-pop with effervescent textures, bright percussion, and mesmerizing piano work that brilliantly contrast her emphatic refusal to compromise her needs. Stacey’s latest triumph includes landing the support slot on New York City band Lawrence’s spring tour and a Main Stage hometown performance at the Montreal Jazz Fest.
The Montreal native is poised to deliver a body of work showing the full extent of her songwriting powers and one-of-a-kind musical imagination. A trained jazz pianist who also plays guitar, bass, ukulele, and trumpet, she possesses an undeniable knack for lyrical storytelling, melodies that endlessly wander into unexpected places, a singular sense of rhythm and song structure that wholly reflects her jazz background.
After graduating high school at age 16, Stacey followed the educational protocol in Quebec, enrolling in a three-year college program in jazz interpretation, studying voice and guitar. “I remember my parents telling me I should have something to fall back on in case music didn’t work out,” she says, “but I knew it had to be music or nothing else. There was never a plan B.” After three semesters she dropped out in early 2022, to follow her own musical path. She focused on building up her catalog of original songs, while continuing to post the intimate yet masterfully executed covers that had won her an adoring TikTok following over the course of the pandemic.
Within a month of leaving school, Stacey launched an open-verse challenge for “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk” – and with Zai1k’s contribution, found herself almost instantly in the eye of the storm, with one of the year’s most viral TikTok trends to date. The track proved wildly resonant and quickly led to such major cultural moments as a New York Times story partly focused on the duet’s breakout success.
“Making music has always felt like play to me,” she sums up. “Even though it’s happening on a more serious level now, it hasn’t lost any of that playful feeling at all.” She hopes to instill in her audience a similar sense of abandon. “Usually when I’m singing and really feeling the music, my face will get all scrunched-up like I’m in pain, which people have definitely commented on before,” she points out. “My answer to that is, ‘I can’t control it – and if I ever tried to, it wouldn’t be as good.’ I hope people get lost in my music in the same way, and I hope it makes them feel like I’m taking thoughts from their head and putting them inside a song.”