“I’m home! I missed you all,” Rio declared halfway while tearing through 18 songs in less than an hour, adding: “It’s f–king hot up here!” Sure enough, the venue was drenched and jumping. A couple of times the mop-topped singer tried to get the 280-strong crowd to open up a pit – not the easiest feat in the narrow confines of the venue – but it spoke to who Riovaz is: A young artist making dance music with the soul of a rapper and a punk rocker.
As any visit to the archives on his Soundcloud or Spotify will reveal, before he melded house, 2-step and drum’n’bass with emo lyrics about heartache, he was a much different artist. His DSPs serve as a fascinating scrapbook of a journey in real time. “I also like surprising myself, too,” he says. “So whenever Idisturb the norm, or whatever, at the end of the day I end up surprising myself, one-upping what I did before. And what comes with that is a disturbance to other people.
Riovaz – the name came from inverting the letters in his early artist alias, “Savior” and changing the “s” to a “z” – did respectable numbers early on, but he was restless. With many around him dismissing his music as more of a hobby than anything serious, by age 14, he was ready to hang it up, but with the encouragement of online friends — in particular like-minded indie rapper MrHeadA$$Trendy — Rio stuck it out. Over the next two years he honed his skills and upped his SoundCloud output.
After that, the reborn Rio came with a flood of new club-ready tracks: the irresistible “I Feel Fantastic,” with its skittish 2-step vibes and lyrics addressing a breakup, anchored last spring’s. That EP also featured “God Save The Girl,” a song whose disco vibes and squiggly synth runs came with a charmer of a video inspired by the 1956 French film— filmed in Paris’ iconic Montmartre district by New York director Dito, to boot.
riovaz1 RIOVAZ
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