Ryan Hemsworth

Halifax, journalism school, and a very fast start

Ryan Hemsworth was born on 23 April 1990 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and studied journalism at the University of King's College in the same city. He began putting music out in 2010, working as a producer and DJ whose method was essentially editorial: find fragments of other people's records, cut them against each other, and let the seams show. His first album-length release, Distorted, arrived in 2011 as a collaboration with the Bay Area rapper Shady Blaze.

Guilt Trips followed on Last Gang Records in 2013 and did the thing debut albums rarely do — it crossed over. It won the Juno Award for Electronic Album of the Year in 2014, the same year Hemsworth took the SOCAN Breakout Award. The remix work that ran alongside it reached Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey and Beyoncé, which in the blog-era economy of the early 2010s functioned as a calling card. He toured on bills with Flume and Tinashe and played Coachella and the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Secret Songs, and the long middle stretch

Alone for the First Time came in 2014 and placed third on CMJ's list of the thirty best albums of that year. Around the same time Hemsworth started Secret Songs, a label and release series that became a reliable early home for artists who later outgrew it — Kero Kero Bonito, GFOTY, No Rome and Tennyson all passed through, and the imprint collected its output on compilations with hex-code titles such as shh#ffb6c1 and shh#000000. A collaborative EP with Lucas, Taking Flight, appeared in 2015.

The second solo album, Elsewhere, arrived in 2018. Then the solo thread went quiet for eight years, though Hemsworth did not. In 2020 Secret Songs entered a partnership with Warp Records; the same year he signed to Saddle Creek under the name Quarter-Life Crisis and released a self-titled EP featuring Frances Quinlan and Hand Habits. He also formed Bodysync with Charlie Yin, who records as Giraffage — a dance project that has put out two albums, the most recent being Nutty in 2024, which Hemsworth has described as dance music made by fans of DIY punk and Y2K pop.

Underneath all of it sat fifteen years of production-for-hire across genres that do not normally share a credit list: Tinashe, Mitski, Tory Lanez, E-40, Alex G and Joji.

What happened to the DJ

Hemsworth has been unusually plain about why the solo records stopped. Speaking to The Fader in August 2026, he described being burnt out by 2019 after years of constant touring and DJ obligations, and asking himself why he was playing four-hour sets fuelled by vodka shots when that had never been the point of making music. The birth of his first child and the arrival of the pandemic settled the question. He worked on things, scrapped an album, and spent a stretch of the early 2020s with no release schedule at all.

Two things brought him back. One was joining Gia Margaret's live band, which he credits with restoring his confidence — he has noted that people at those shows did not realise the guitarist was him. The other was the instrument itself. Talking to Our Culture in October 2026, he said the guitar feels connected to being younger, and described rediscovering the teenage experience of playing with no end goal attached. The BPM-first, club-facing mindset of his late-2010s work went in the bin. He cited The Notwist as a model: bands that occupy a few different worlds at once.

Numbskull

Numbskull was announced on 12 August 2026 and released on 21 October via Topshelf Records — his first solo album since Elsewhere and his first for the label, which is better known for experimental rock than for anything with a four-four kick. The announcement came with two songs: 'One Step', sung by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, and 'A Display of Emotion', which Hemsworth said was chasing an ideal balance of sad guitar and bass heavy enough to rattle his car boot. His stated approach to features on the record was to give people wild cards. Much of it was made around childcare — on headphones, late at night, after long days with his kids, with the results pushed through distortion pedals.

The guest list bears out the wild-card policy: Tegan and Sara, Dylan Kern of MSPAINT, Nana Lourdes, allie, and Tudzin. 'Never Learned', released as a single on 30 September 2026, is the one that reframed the project. Hemsworth said he had followed Tegan and Sara since seeing them on television as a teenager and found it surreal to end up on something so energetic and heavy with them. Sara said writing it gave her an excuse to scream and to use her voice in a way she rarely does, and noted that the lyrics date from the pandemic — five years and two kids later, she does not fully recognise the person in them. The accompanying video, built with Tokyo-based animators, puts a video-game version of Hemsworth in an endless loop.

Reception has been good rather than unanimous. Photog Music gave the album 8/10 on release day, calling it a daring, cohesive step forward and singling out 'Never Learned' as the midway twist that turns Hemsworth into a rock bandleader on an urgent emo anthem. Pitchfork's review credited his ear for detail and his willingness to twist tracks around by the arm. Listener dissent runs the other way: a user review on Album of the Year scored it 58/100 and complained the record is all over the place, arguing it would land better if it committed to its IDM and electro-industrial material. Reference points thrown around include Paramore, A. G. Cook and Melt-Banana, which gives a fair sense of how wide the thing is.

By his own account the rollout has been handled accordingly. The day after release, he said, he did his posting for it and then went and played with his kid.

On the road behind George Clanton

The touring position right now is support, not headline. Hemsworth is attached to George Clanton's 'Mainstream Now' US tour, which runs from 21 October to 25 November 2026 with openers rotating by region. Hemsworth took the Roseville, California date at Goldfield Trading Post on 23 October, then anchored the nine-date East Coast leg announced on 21 August: Chicago's Concord Music Hall on 4 November, The Roxy at Mahall's in Cleveland on 5 November, Spirit Hall in Pittsburgh on the 6th, Black Cat in Washington DC on the 7th, Union Transfer in Philadelphia on the 8th, Paradise Rock Club in Boston on the 9th, Brooklyn Steel on the 11th, the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville on the 12th and The National in Richmond on the 13th. He is booked worldwide outside the EU by Josh Stern at Ground Control Touring.

It is a deliberate pairing rather than a convenient one. Clanton's audience arrived through vaporwave and internet-native pop, and Hemsworth's catalogue — lo-fi, sample-led, allergic to a single lane — lines up with that without needing explanation. The rooms are mid-size clubs of the kind he was playing a decade ago, which is a reasonable position for an artist whose last solo record predates most of the current crowd's listening habits.

No published reviews of the East Coast dates have appeared yet; the leg is two shows old. What is clear from the record itself is what the set has to carry: guitars loud enough to sit next to blast beats, three or four different singers' parts to cover without those singers present, and a closer, 'Shifting and Turning', that strips everything back to ambient quiet.