Rumor has it that if you say the name Rujen three times into a vintage delay pedal, planets shift and gravity begins to disappear. In Brooklyn last month, the audience didn't even have to say it once before everyone in the Sultan Room started to float on a cloud of reverb, delay, and distortion. Formed between college study breaks during the thick, humid summers in Milledgeville, Georgia, Rujen is a dreamy surf-psych-rock band comprised of lead vocals and rhythm guitarist Ryan Miller, lead guitarist Creighton Perme, synth and keyboardist Nick Hanchey, bassist Charlie Brady, and drummer Ryan Barrett. It was the band’s first time playing in New York City, and they put on an unforgettable show.

Rujen began their set with a wall of sound and dreamy lyrics, playing “Psychic Sister” off of their new album Velvet Dream. We were then launched into a rock-psychedelia tsunami with “Push It,” firing up the crowd into an “anything goes” dance party with heavy delay riffs from Creighton and saturated synths from Nick. The title track for “Velvet Dream” was up next, and it was reminiscent of Electric Light Orchestra in the best way. The easy listening track is perfect street walking music with introspective lyrics from Ryan Miller to match.

Rujen continued to melt faces as they dove into three new unreleased tracks, playing “The Liz”, “Steppin’ Out”, and “Under the Light” which had a great dichotomy of fast drumming from Ryan Barrett and ethereal melody on the guitars. The next track, “Spider Silk,” really took us through a tailspin through dismantled frequencies, contemplative melodies, lullaby-like lyrics and otherworldly jams. Before their last song, Ryan Miller took a moment to shout out and thank the friends and family who supported them during their tour. The quintet ended the show with “Neptune’s Revenge,” with Charlie and Creighton trading riffs on bass and guitar. As the last echoes of the Sultan Room dissolved into the Brooklyn night, Rujen finally came to rest, leaving behind a room of people who had arrived on solid ground but left in mid air on a cloud of resonance.

Before the show, we were able to sit down with Rujen for an interview:

I heard this tour has been quite the excursion, tell me about where you’ve been and the journey to get to tonight’s show at the Sultan Room in Brooklyn?

Charlie Brady: So we had a three stop tour originally planned, and it was Richmond, Spring City and Manhattan, for the route. It was gonna be three days in a row, and on the way up, I think we had just gotten into South Carolina and found out that the original venue in Manhattan had double booked us. So the morale in the van shot down super quick. We were all pretty pissed because we were like, wow, we're about to drive to New York for kind of no reason now at this point. We were pretty unsure of what was gonna happen. But, you know, no one lost their cool and our buddy who had booked the show, Ryan Simpson, came through clutch as hell and ended up taking his band, Kama Sutra Christmas Club, off a bill they had at Sultan Room so that we could play instead. We owe him big time for that one! It all turned out for the better but it was kind of an emotional roller coaster for a second there.

Ryan Miller: We busted a tire on the way to Spring City, which was a band first. Had all five of us out there on the side of the highway flailing around trying to fix it and scratchin’ our heads like a bunch of baboons.

Charlie Brady: I think we were about three miles from the Delaware State Line in Elkton, Maryland, where the tire blew, and we're sitting there, and Creighton's the only one who noticed it. He goes, I think the tire blew, fellas.. And we're all like, I don't know Craig (Creighton). And he's like, I'm pretty sure I heard the air leave the tire, fellas.

Eventually we pull over and we're like, Fuck, he was right. The whole thing was flattened on the ground, and we tried lifting it, like, what, eight or nine times… it wasn't working. And eventually we settled, we had these two books. It was, I believe, a reggae music history book, and the owner's manual for the 2019 Ford Transit XLT, and we stacked the yoga mat on top of that as well to provide a little more height. Got the tire off and changed it. So we showed up an hour late to our Philly show in Spring City but still rocked it.

Is this your first time performing in NYC?

Ryan Miller: Correct, this is our first time performing in any of these cities.

So how did everyone meet and what drove you guys to create this musical project?

Creighton Perme: The majority of us are college friends from Georgia College in Milledgeville, GA, but Rujen didn’t begin until around 2016 when Ryan, Nick, and I had moved back home to the metro Atlanta area. Ryan B. was the final addition to the band, joining us on the cans a bit before we put out our first record.

Ryan Barrett: I was in another band at the time, and we played a show with them at Aisle 5. I really fucked with these guys, I thought they were sick, and I kept going to see them play. I think I told Creighton one time I was just like, hey man, if you guys ever need a drummer, call me. Creighton did end up calling me one day and now, we’re in New York City.

Ryan Miller: In college, we played under the name Keeva around town at the local bars. We absolutely loved the feeling of playing live and writing songs together and kept that up after graduating and moving to Atlanta.

Was there a reason for the name change?

Charlie Brady: There’s actually another band in Ireland called Keeva and they sent us a cease and desist.

Ryan Miller: With Hanchey joining the band, we wanted to change the sound a bit from what we were doing in college and, you know, really unite under the idea of being an indie-psych band or whatever you call it. So we wanted a heady new name to go with that.

And what was the meaning behind the name Rujen?

Charlie Brady: So I think Craig actually went out on this field trip, part of a study abroad for college. It was this story about how he went up on this mountain and Rujen was the name of the mountain. But I guess you must’ve seen something up there, man. And you know, I don’t ask questions, I just play root notes and fifths. So I was like, fuck it, man. You know, Rujen is gonna be the name of the band.

Ryan Miller: Yeah. And we said, “What is that man?" He said, “I don’t know, man, it’s a feeling.” We were like, “Alright, man. That’s deep. Sounds good.”

Charlie Brady: So we’ve stuck with it and now we’re almost 8 years in it.

Cool! So this tour is to promote the new album, Velvet Dream, which fans have described as ‘dream pop.’ Can you tell us about the creative process of forming the album and maybe expand on if you would consider the genre to be dream pop or something else?

Ryan Miller: So, our first record, Feel It’s True, was kind of just like a hodge podge of all the new songs we were working on as this new band, Rujen. And I think Velvet Dream is different in that we wanted something super cohesive to really establish what our sound is, what we’re trying to do, what we’re trying to present ourselves as. And dream pop is cool, for sure. I don’t think that’s exactly what we set out to be, but what’s cool about it is that people have their own interpretations of it, you know. We do some dreamy shit, but we also like to hit the fuzz pedals and rock out. We are inspired by a pretty broad range of music like Broadcast or Stereolab to King Gizzard or Ty Segall. So we try to keep it loose, I guess.

Charlie Brady: I would say the elevator pitch for our band is we like to say we’re an east coast band with a west coast sound. And if you really want to put us in a corner and label us, I think somewhere amongst the labels like indie dream, surf, psych, rock.

I love the elevator pitch. Going off of the creation of the new album, when you guys are in the studio, do you ever surprise yourselves? Ie, when you’re creating, does the music ever take you somewhere where it didn’t plan to go?

Nick Hanchey: For sure I feel like happy accidents happen all the time when we’re making new music. I feel like a lot of the process that we try to implement, is like, getting out of your own way. Not necessarily trying to think too hard, but listen critically and be willing to explore where things are going. And a lot of times that takes you to a place that you definitely didn’t preconceive. It’s kind of like we’re starting on this idea and then it gets collectively filtered through all of our five different personalities which ends up at a place where nobody could have gone by themselves. So it ends up sounding a lot more interesting and cool and just feels collaborative.

Amazing, sounds like you guys have a lot of chemistry. Going off that, we also saw the great music video for a few songs on Velvet Dream that came out last year and loved the artistic angle between fantasy and psychedelia that it brought. Where did the inspiration come for the music video, and what did it take to create it?

Ryan Miller: So I think we’re a pretty goofy group of dudes and it’s a little strange because maybe our music doesn’t feel that way particularly. It’s pretty serious, you know. So I think with the videos, it’s an opportunity for us to show that side of ourselves, have fun with it and just make the most crazy, far out shit we can think of.

Charlie Brady: In that particular video, “Psychic Sister” and “Spider Silk”, we filmed up near a German town called Helen,GA and it was very cold outside during MLK weekend. We had our friends, Vaughn and Elyse, come along to help produce and film the video. Sometimes it’s good to have people that aren't in the band to give you a different creative direction to go into. Elyse is a crafts wizard and designed the sun mask from paper mache as well as designing the sun costume.

Ryan Miller: And then our good friend, Elise Williams, designed our costumes that the band wore. So we had all the friends involved and got real crafty. It truly takes a village, ya know? And then we’ve got to give a massive shout out Christopher Fodera, our video editor and visual effects maestro, who really took what we had and turned it into something fucking amazing. I’ve always been inspired by Toro y Moi’s unique approach to video projects and with this record we wanted to do something different by announcing the record with a double-single, double music video. It just felt super big and exciting for us to do something different than the standard album rollout.

What’s the one thing about this band that you don’t think the world fully sees yet?

Creighton Perme: I think our live shows are a pretty fun experience that we try to make a little bit more special. We try to transition between songs and have jams, and a lot of that isn’t really captured so far into what you find on streaming.

Nick Hanchey: Because we all started out as a live music band, we would spend a lot of time crafting a set list with really intricate, froggy, inspired transitions and stuff between songs that is not recorded. We’ve actually never even recorded a live session. We don’ t have studio content of us playing in a live setting currently. So the only way to see that is to come to a show.

Charlie Brady: There’s chemistry that can’t truly be captured on an album that kind of gets filtered out with the whole recording process which I think, you know, is translated very well in a live setting. So we’re just happy to be playing for different crowds and getting reactions at live shows.

What does making music give you that nothing else can?

Ryan Barrett: For me, it's an escape. When we get together — whether we're at practice or playing a show — it's almost like meditation. We get so locked in that none of us are really here, you know? We're somewhere else entirely.

Ryan Miller: We try not to bring all the external stuff into the jam room as best we can — just focus on the music and get lost in it. It's a nice thing to have. You step into that room and all the shit you were worried about, you can forget about for the next two hours.

Charlie Brady: On tour, there are a lot of tiny moving parts — get to the Airbnb, get your coffee, wake up, pack up, soundcheck, dinner. Most of it isn't even music. You're only on stage performing for maybe 30 minutes, and you can get frustrated with all the minutia. But usually there's a moment on stage, maybe a couple songs in, where I think, whatever I was pissed off about earlier, none of that shit matters. This is what we're all here for — being present in it. And it feels fucking good. It's like a bug, and once you catch it, it doesn't go away. You keep chasing that dragon. And that's kind of where we're all at.

What do you want the people who listen to your music to take away from it?

Ryan Miller: Just to feel good. Some of our earlier stuff had a darker undertone — more alternative sounding maybe. But there was definitely a switch where we decided we just wanted the music to be fun. We want people to come out, dance, let loose, and not take it too seriously. A more positive vibe — which I think is captured in our last record, and honestly in a lot of songs on the first record too. That's what I hope people feel when they see us.

What's your dream music venue that you'd like to play at?

Ryan Miller: The Gorge.

Creighton Perme: Madison Square Garden.

Nick Hanchey: Probably Red Rocks, but I will say Sultan Room is sick!

Charlie Brady: I would love to play at the Spirit of Suwanee Park.

Ryan Barrett: Red Rocks.

What’s next for Rujen?

Charlie Brady: So we have been talking about music videos, and we recently went down to Florida and recorded a music video for an unreleased song called “Under the Light” that is coming out sometime this summer.

Go catch Rujen at a venue near you today!

Connect with Rujen on Instagram, Spotify, TikTok and their website.

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