Rituals of Mine

Sacramento, 2010, under another name

The project now called Rituals of Mine began in Sacramento in 2010 as Sister Crayon, a duo of Terra Lopez on vocals and Dani Fernandez on samplers. Genaro Ulloa on keys and Nicholas Suhr on drums joined roughly a year later, turning a bedroom pairing into a touring four-piece. The debut video, "(In) Reverse", aired on MTV's LOGO network in May 2010, and that September the group put out a limited split 7" with Warpaint and contributed a David Bowie cover to a tribute compilation.

The first album, Bellow, recorded at Hangar Studios in Sacramento, arrived on Manimal Vinyl on 22 February 2011. It set out the register the project has worked in ever since: electronic production under a voice that carries most of the emotional weight, with the arrangements kept sparse enough that the words land. In 2013 the band toured extensively in support of Bosnian Rainbows, the Omar Rodríguez-López group, which proved to be the connection that shaped the next record.

Devoted, Warner Bros and the name change

Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In, co-produced the second album, Devoted, released in February 2016 through Rodriguez-Lopez Productions. The name change to Rituals of Mine followed in July 2016, and in September that year Devoted was reissued via Warner Bros. Records with new production and mastering by Tom Coyne. October 2016 brought a tour with Deftones and a label launch event for the record at Warner Bros.

That stretch is the closest the project has come to operating inside the major-label machine, and the catalogue since has moved back towards smaller, more controlled releases. The Sleeper Hold EP came out on Carpark Records on 4 October 2019, four tracks built around harder, more percussive production than Devoted.

Hype Nostalgia and a year without a voice

Hype Nostalgia, released by Carpark on 25 September 2020, is the record that reset how the project is understood. Lopez made it after two deaths: her father died by suicide, and her closest friend drowned roughly six months later. She has described being unable to sing for about a year afterwards, with the trauma affecting her voice and body directly, and has talked about the vocal lessons, medication, talk therapy and EMDR that went into getting back to work.

Rather than a grief record, she structured the album as a timeline from childhood to the present, with the stated aim of holding joy and pain in equal measure. Paste named it one of the best albums of 2020. Alongside it, Lopez and bandmate Adam Pierce ran a podcast, Hype Nostalgia TV, interviewing other artists about what nostalgia meant to them. A remix edition followed in 2021.

Lopez's work has run outside records as well. She built an immersive installation, This Is What It Feels Like, drawn from lived experience, and has given interviews on housing, gender equity and making music as a queer artist. Bandcamp Daily's description of the sound — "an industrial strength Aaliyah" — remains the most quoted line about her.

2026: Endure, LabRats and OTRA

After a run of singles in 2024 — "Black Dog", "Bruise" and "Head On" — Lopez brought in the hip-hop and jazz trio LabRats as the backing band in 2025, with new music flagged for the following year. The single "Hard to Miss" landed in March 2026 and the Endure EP on 3 April 2026: four tracks, "Hard to Miss", "Holding Pattern", "Leave Myself" and "Rewound", written by Rituals of Mine and produced, mixed and mastered by Wes Jones at Pulp Arts and WJ Studios. The release is dedicated to listeners with a one-word instruction repeated three times: endure.

The framing around Endure is about working from joy as much as from pain, which is a different position to the one Hype Nostalgia came from. The LabRats partnership is the practical half of that: a live band of improvising players instead of backing tracks, which pushes the material away from the studio arrangements towards something looser.

That live configuration produced the next release. OTRA, billed as a live album by Rituals of Mine featuring LabRats, arrived in November 2026 — the first record documenting the pairing rather than the studio project.

Where things stand this month

Rituals of Mine is currently out as support on Tune-Yards' North American run, The Ones That Love You, announced on 18 September 2026. Lopez appears at all nine dates: Chicago's Outset on 5 November, the Whirling Tiger in Louisville on the 7th, Woodward Theater in Cincinnati on the 8th, Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids on the 10th, Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland on the 11th, the Homer Center for the Arts in New York state on the 14th, 3S Artspace in Portsmouth on the 15th, Space Ballroom in Hamden on the 16th and Paradise Rock Club in Boston on the 18th. Songkick also lists an off-night in Indianapolis at Atomic Bowl Duckpin on 6 November. The headline set on that tour is built around Tune-Yards' score for Boots Riley's film I Love Boosters, which puts Rituals of Mine in front of audiences who have come for something closer to experimental composition than to alt-R&B.

Before the tour, the year was mostly Californian and mostly small: a billing third from top at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on 8 October 2026, under Casa Sueño and Ray Yeh, doors at eight and music at half past, twenty dollars at the door. Earlier 2026 listings put the band in Sacramento rooms including the Crocker Art Museum, Amatoria Fine Art Books and The Golden Bear, plus the Davis Music Festival in June and The Love Song in Los Angeles on 25 June.

The run closes in Sacramento. An OTRA release party is booked for Saturday 5 December 2026 at Beers Books on R Street: doors at seven, Fugitive Color from half past until eight, Rituals of Mine from eight until nine, then a vinyl signing and a merchandise pop-up until half nine. It is all ages, capacity is limited, and the organisers describe it as a living-room-style show among the shelves.

What the room gets

The clearest recent account of a headline show is Portland's Jack London Revue on 31 January 2026, where Kingsley and LabRats each played opening sets before LabRats returned to back Lopez. The setlist drew across the catalogue, including "Overcome", "Head On" and "Black Dog". The room was small enough that Lopez left the stage and worked the floor, and she told the crowd that it was listener support that had kept her performing. Eleven PDX called it a space of community and healing, and judged it the right way to start the year.

That is the shape the project now trades on: a band that improvises behind her, no large production to hide inside, and a performer who treats the gap between stage and floor as something to close rather than to maintain.