RY X had been living a big life: soaking in experiences while he traveled the world playing for the crowds that gathered to see him. Eventually, he knew it was time to go inward.

"I wanted to really feel what was happening for me underneath the external world, the external persona and the delivery of music to others," he says. “After a lot of outward expression, I needed to see what was in there and touch it, hold it and mold it." 

So in early 2026, in an old barn on his sprawling avocado farm near the ocean, the revered Australian singer, songwriter and musician tucked himself away to explore his emotional terrain and see what music might come from it. The process worked. The songs flowing from this inquisition were intimate and vulnerable, as RY X wrote about love and longing, deep connections to self and nature, grief, joy and, he says, “the dance with spirit itself.” He worked mostly alone with just a guitar and piano, an analog practice that matched the music’s deeply human themes.

These songs from the barn are now assembled into Dusk, the fourth RY X studio album, arriving in early 2027. A folk record as delicate as it is deep, it’s a project to play from start to finish, to live with, to notice for its nuances as much as its grand flourishes. “These songs belong to each other,” RY X says. “It’s a little snapshot of time.”

Lead single “Holy Water” is a prayer to Earth’s great waterways, the water that sustains our bodies and the depth of emotion inside us all. “If I break my heart open to your heart,” RY X asks in the song, “could you lay with me under all these seas?” “Fall In” is his hushed and holy take on Americana. He calls the brightly optimistic breakup lullaby “Don’t Let It Get You Down” his “secret crush” of the album, and a song for which he brought a gospel choir out to record in the barn. Dusk’s visual identity is centered on stunning portraits by photographer Kacie Tomita, with its videos incorporating the dance and performance art that’s long been a throughline of RY X’s output.

As day turns to night and vice versa, Dusk closes a cycle in its arrival 10 years after RY X’s debut studio album, Dawn. This first project established him as a neo-folk hero and an artist’s artist with the skills and sensibilities to work across indie, electronic, ambient and orchestral, with pop impulses never far from reach. Raised on a permaculture farm in New South Wales and long based in California, RY X has played around the world in spaces ranging from cathedrals to clubs. He’s worked with artists including Drake, who tapped him for work on 2022’s Honestly, Nevermind, and Black Coffee, who featured RY X on his 2021 Grammy-winning album Subconsciously. Other collaborators include John Legend, Ólafur Arnalds, ODESZA, the London Symphony Orchestra and L.A. Philharmonic, with RY X’s etheric voice unmistakable regardless of what genre it appears in. Collectively, his catalog has generated over a billion global streams across all DSPs.

RY X will bring Dusk to audiences around the world for a 2027 tour that includes dates at the Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall and other venues as stunning as they are prestigious. For the first time in his career, he may perform portions of the show solo, a nod to the solitary fashion in which he made the music.

In sharing music capturing the depth and meaning of a chapter in his life, RY X’s wish is to help catalyze meaning in yours, too. “I hope these songs are played when people are falling in love, when they're in grief, when they're in transition,” he says. “It’s one of the greatest honors to accompany people in these spaces.”

And proof, perhaps, that some things are best made by hand, in a barn near the ocean.