In 2019, right before COVID hit, Indiana-based musician Ryan Davis disbanded State Champion, the musical act he'd fronted for the previous decade and a half.
Years on the road with the noise-rock band had Davis feeling burnt out and wanting to focus on visual art and other musical endeavors. As a songwriter, he also knew that he wanted to move in directions that didn't make sense for State Champion.
"I really always wanted to have a slightly more experimental approach to making music," he said. "I wanted to sing differently and use my voice in different ways. I wanted to play with synthesizers and drum machines."
Though COVID wasn't the reason he decided to break up the band, the lockdown gave him time and space to figure out what he would do differently once the world opened up again.
He eventually got together with some friends and a new batch of songs, and Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band was born. In 2023, they released their debut album "Dancing On The Edge" on Davis's own Sophomore Lounge label.
At first Davis wasn't so keen on having his name front and center, but after some encouragement from his friends, he warmed up to it.
"I thought, if nothing else, it's a way for me to put this music out and have people I've met through the years of touring know that it's mine. People I've played with in the past, or people whose couches I've slept on," he said. "I figured maybe like 300 people were going to be interested in this record, and they could identify it quicker if it was me instead of some vague and artistic band name."
Earlier this year, the band released its album "New Threats From The Soul" to critical acclaim from outlets ranging from Pitchfork to The Wall Street Journal. The record allowed Davis to stretch out in ways he'd wanted to before, but felt like he couldn't. Three of the album's seven songs hover right around the 10 minute mark, and he uses synths and drum machines to build soundscapes that make the project hard to label with a genre tag. Davis's music was once described as "punked up country gunk" by songwriter James Jackson Toth, and there's plenty of that on the record too.
What stands out first and foremost, though, are Davis's lyrics. He's one of the sharpest writers going today, with a keen ability to develop a character in just a few lines.
"Back with State Champion, I would just sit down and come up with a verse, and then a week later come up with another one. I was basically writing the songs in my head," he said. "Now I keep a book full of lyrics and images and one-liners and couplets that I can pull from. For a couple of the songs on "New Threats For The Soul," I actually typed out the lyrics and cut them up and laid them out and moved them around on my bed. It was like physically sculpting the songs in a way I'd never done before. It was a bit of an experiment that I actually think was successful."
His lyrics contain equal parts humor and desperation. "I used to hawk primordial truth in the faces of men. Now I'm down here pacing the pawn shop pulling IOUs out of ATMs," he sings on the album's closer "Crass Shadows (at Walden Pawn)."
Aside from being a musician, Davis is also a visual artist, and both of The Roadhouse Band's records feature his own cover art. Davis says he was inspired at an early age by artists like Raymond Pettibon, who designed art for Black Flag, and Pedro Bell, who worked with Funkadelic.
"As a music fan growing up, I thought it was so cool to see those artists running wild with their imaginations and building these worlds that were tied to the music," he said.
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse band are on tour now, and will be at the Cat's Cradle Back Room on Wednesday, December 3.
