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ryan and alex

WINTER I

ryan and alex

WINTER I is a collection of 4 songs that narrates the different stages of grief in a breakup, moving from denial to acceptance in one sonic journey.Click on a track title below to read more about it.


If You Ever Come Back

‘If You Ever Come Back’ is a desperate plea to an unfixable relationship.We recorded this at Brad's studio in Barcelona, and to be honest, we had no idea what "SER" was at this point, nor that we'd become a full-blown artist project. We just made music because we loved it, and more importantly, because we felt it.Originally, the verses were the pre-chorus, with a different verse leading the song in, and there was also a completely different meaning to the chorus. It was originally written as "I want you to feel the way I do, when I think about you" with a Westlife-type tagline afterwards. Thankfully, Josh McClelland (a wonderfully talented Irish songwriter) helped us perfect this masterpiece that would set SER on the right journey.- ryan & alex - august 2023


Ten Times Worse

‘Ten Times Worse’ depicts the end of a relationship in which neither party hates each other.Now this is actually the first song we wrote together, and we knew it would be a big one, so we pitched the song out (meaning we were sending it to other artists to see if they wanted to record and release it) and got absolutely no replies. We were sat there like 'we know this a banger', we could feel it in our gut, so you know what - we released it ourselves.It took a while to figure out everything after the second chorus, we actually had a version that had a mad Coldplay-type build but we decided against it and favoured the sided of brevity, with a big lift vocally into the guitar section.- ryan & alex - august 2023


Never Stood A Chance

‘Never Stood A Chance’ is about coming to accept that a relationship was doomed to fail.In terms of the stages of grief, this was the turning point lyrically. It's about acceptance. Initially, it was a co-write with Katie Kittermaster (an incredible writer from the UK), and was later embellished by Brad Mair, our fantastic producer based in Barcelona.For the production elements, we tried to replicate the 'Only You' cover performed by the Flying Pickets when those strange backing vocals creep in every now and then. There's also a recording of the cows and their bells in the hills of Barcelona in there, as they woke us up each morning and we thought we'd at least make them useful!- ryan & alex - august 2023


Out Of Reach

Out Of Reach is a song originally performed by GABRIELLE. Our version wraps up the WINTER I perfectly, it's about acknowledging how it was never going to work out.We're assuming you've heard the original, we hope one day if GABRIELLE hears our version they'll enjoy it :)It's a funny story how it came about, we saw that TikTok had a trend coming up about reinventing classic songs as dance songs, and so we sped this up by around 30bpm to a dance-tempo, not realising it was going to make an awesome SER vibe. We posted it on TikTok but it didn't go crazy, however, if you know us, we're not that into the whole rat-race of posting a thousand things a day online, so we just let the release do the talking.- ryan & alex - august 2023


SPRING I

ryan and alex

SPRING I is the second EP, following on from WINTER I, this body of music deliberates between reminiscing (looking backwards), and reinventing (moving forwards). The idea that Spring is a time of new is not lost on us, but with each step forwards we are reminded of the past that led us here.Click on a track title below to read more about it.


Cry Them For You

‘Cry Them For You’ embodies the first moment of realisation that you’re finally over someone, it tells the story of a new era in someone’s life when they realise they can choose happiness.Moving on is a big deal, let's face it. We've all been through break-ups and we all know firsthand what it's like to have that eye-watering moment where you finally see in colour again, and you can finally be happy or move on as you please. With 'Cry Them For You' we're saying you choose to get to that point, you have to reject the emotion, at some point, as soon as you're physically and mentally ready.Again, written with the wonderful Josh McClelland, who you can hear quite clearly in the response phrases of the vocal chants, i.e "Cry them for you!!!:- ryan & alex - august 2023


Bloom

Bloom is what happens when you allow yourself to move on, you find happiness, or love, once again.Okay so this song is clearly about trying not to fall in love, but it happening anyway. It's inspired by a very personal situation and will always inspire memories of falling in love, but let's look at it for a minute. Have you ever stopped looking for something, and then found it? Have you ever tried to remember the title/artist of a song but couldn't, and then later in the day it popped into your head? We believe love works like that, once you stop looking for it, the universe will present it to you, and you will be made ready for it.- ryan & alex - august 2023


Why Did We Say Forever

‘Why Did We Say Forever’ is a song about regret, and equally a song about taking what you’ve learned from a past relationship into a future one.Finding happiness is always about moving forwards and not promising things you aren’t in control of, but we’ve all been in a situation where we’ve told someone we’re going to be ‘together forever’, only to feel stupid when you breakup and those words can so easily be used against you. Facepalm moment where you remind yourself not to be so naive. But you know what, we will fall for it again, whether it's love or any kind of lesson. The universe will keep presenting a lesson to you until you learn it!So, fun story, this song started as a dance track with Tobias Reinstrom. He was looking for a dance track that was like the 1975, and this is what we came up with. Obviously we reproduced it in the SER style, but we've always said we should release a dance remix of it too because it BANGED.- ryan & alex - august 2023


AUTUMN I

Photo taken drunkenly out of a Seoul cab.

AUTUMN I might be our fourth EP, but it's our first EP created entirely in response to your comments. We wanted to step outside our comfort zone and make something completely bespoke for you, between ourselves - we colloquially call it 'your-autumn'.Click on a track title below to read more about it.


Lost Without You

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Don't even try and convince us you've never felt this way before. Everyone learns this lesson at some point. Some philosophise that we fall in love 3 times in our lives, and if I were to believe in that, it would be because you have to ruin something that you didn't know you couldn't live without, and couldn't go back to. That's how we learn to love better, and how we learn to fight for something that's worth saving.How did this song come about? Well, Ryan had just moved into his very own home and had a renewed energy about him. Naturally, he took this energy to TikTok, asking people for topics to write about, and this was the very first one, so it only made sense we release it first.It's our first song ever that is completely written, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered in-house. As in just the two of us! That felt a bit scary, as we're used to getting help from people with more experience, but you know, when we sat down and listened to it, we thought D*MN. This is it, it's done, it's ready.- ryan & alex - august 2023

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When we read this comment on TikTok, we absolutely knew what Jen was talking about. Although it's not something we'd personally been through, we know people who have been through it. That look in their eye. That realisation that you thought your friendship was safe. Poof. All disappearing in an instant.
I just (don't) love you like that.
The response to this song was incredible, we put out a rough demo of it and we felt like this really struck
a chord with everyone, we knew we were onto something. Alex took the vocal and suddenly came back with a demo, the caption "I think I did something". VOILA. It was love at first listen, we handed it over to a friend Phil (LVL3) to polish it up and give it that anthemic push and we fell in love so drastically (but not like that). Ryan went to New Zealand over Christmas and filmed so much beautiful content and scenery and we edited it to make a budget music video. Ironically, Ryan proposed to his girlfriend on this trip, so it's forever hilarious that his engagement trip is soundtracked by DLYLT. Oops!
- ryan & alex - february 2024

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The journey of this song is paved with pure stress and anxiety. Ironic, right?Towards the end of last year we received a comment on TikTok asking us to write a song about “healing”, “fighting anxiety” and “getting back to being you again”, and we had written several songs about what we thought was that.Until one day, we wrote The NPC, and came to realise that the first step towards healing is coming to terms with where you’re at, painfully honestly.We’d chatted about how much of our life we’d wasted being too palatable for our partners and family and friends, and how our anxiety held us back from ever doing anything outside of our own heads. The idea culminated with the lyrics “I never know how to leave”, and listing things that we stayed at for too long, leading us to having not lived at all. So whilst this song might not be a parade of how far we’ve come and how our lives are incomparably holistic, it is an honest song instead, one that tells you how we feel, who we really are, and who knows, maybe now we can work towards writing that song. (The NPC pt.2?)- ryan & alex - february 2024

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There must be another way
To live my life
To sleep at night
The other day I saw the light
And it got me thinking
I don't need a lot
No money or fame
I just wanna feel safe
In a world that's built to escape
There must be another way
It would be easy to say a lot about this song, it would be hard to make it concise. Let's see where this synopsis lands.I'm a firm believer that if you open up your mind to something, acknowledge it, and bring awareness to it, answers can and will seem to find their way to you. Wherever you are in life, it's so easy to find yourselves in these situations where you have to realise something's going wrong, now we wrote this from a comment about trying to quit drugs, (not fun!), such a simple and sentient statement. Poetry is about feelings, not about verbose sentences, and I can tell you now that this comment is something that hit me. I hate that feeling when you know you've built up these bad habits but you can't seem to find the alternative.Let's say you've never been addicted to drugs before, as I hope most haven't, this can still apply in so many ways. Eating the wrong foods, drinking too much alcohol, hanging out with the wrong characters, playing video games long into the night, these are all things we do when life just doesn't feel enough and we fill that void however we know best.One day, when everything seems too much, you find yourself asking yourself if there is another way. I wish I had the answers yet, but I'm sorry to say I don't.- ryan & alex - april 2024

SUMMER I

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Did you know we can write happy songs too?

Falling For A Friend

Today is the 12th July 2024, and in exactly one year to this day I will be marrying my best friend. I don't know who even reads this website but it feels really nice just to say that. It's a very happy day for me and I would love to celebrate more but I've somehow managed to fracture my ribs playing football, so instead my fiancé is making me a bacon and egg sandwich whilst I do all the release errands for SER with Alex. Life is wonderfully rich tapestry. Enjoy!Ryan x

without.

Okay, so this is our first collab EVER and who better to do it with than the incredible WOOSEOK of Pentagon. Who, by the way, SMASHED the vocal on this one, we weren't sure what to expect as we knew he was mainly a rapper, but it turned out so good and we're so happy this song made it's way into the world.I (Ryan) have been working in Seoul for a little while now, back and forth making KPOP bangers and soaking up the South Korean culture. Sometime in 2023 I met Jinho of Pentagon and wrote a song with him that ended up on the PADO EP (the song was Billie Jean!!! Look at the credits 😛). So when it came to looking for collabs this one made perfect sense.I was in Seoul a few weeks ago shooting promo for without. and met WooSeok in person, and I can just say, I was so impressed with how humble and polite he was (also tall haha). I never know what to expect when coming across public figures because I would never consider myself one and have tended to keep more behind the curtains with the songwriters and producers. Thankfully working with WooSeok was a pleasure and I actually got along with him really well, I was super nervous doing all the filming because I'm kinda new to it and he is obviously a pro and a star. I know I'll come across as less confident and sure of myself but I also know it's part of the journey, I remember coming away and thinking my hair looks stupid 🤣 but instead of refilming I was just like "okay it is what it is, it's honest at least".What an exceptionally long journal entry, and I haven't even spoken about the story behind the song!Firstly, we wanted the title to be all lowercase because 1. it looked cool, and 2. it's how it fits into the lyric, "I know now, what I can't live without." It feels very finite and powerful to end with the full stop, like you're there now, you get it, you've learned the lesson.The story behind the writing is pretty amazing, I got the chance to work with Andrea Rosario - who is such a fantastic writer and has even worked with Lauv!!!- and we wrote this song so effortlessly and fluidly. She inspired me to focus less on the intricacies of songwriting and more on the feeling of the song, where it wants to go, and in a way it is kinda what inspired me to be an artist, I started asking what would I do, instead of what would Bieber do.Anyways, big ups to the producer - Freedo - who is also super incredible and a good (great) ((amazing)) friend, and quite literally has the patience of a saint when dealing with all my feedbacks haha.LOVE ♥️15th November, 2024
Ryan x