Nashville songwriter and producer Junior Pro, the solo project of Kyle Ryan, has announced a new album, ‘Cool’, due out September 18 through Easy Does It Records. The news arrives with ‘SPORTS!’, a tightly wound new single accompanied by a video.

Ryan has spent much of their career working behind the scenes, writing, producing and performing with artists including Kacey Musgraves, Natalie Prass, Zac Farro, Liza Anne, Molly Tuttle, Dr. Dog, Eric Slick and Rayland Baxter. Junior Pro turns that experience inward, though not in any especially tidy way. The music is busy, sharp-edged and deliberately difficult to pin down, pulling pop songwriting through a jumble of nervous rhythms, sudden turns and studio detail.

‘SPORTS!’ takes one of the most ordinary forms of conversation and treats it as something faintly alien. Ryan has described the song as an attempt to finally confront their own blank response whenever sport entered the conversation, turning a familiar piece of small talk into something restless and exaggerated.

The track moves with the energy of someone trying to keep up with a subject they only half understand. Its angular arrangement mirrors the confusion at the centre of the song, while the title’s exclamation mark feels less celebratory than slightly desperate.

‘SPORTS!’ follows the earlier singles ‘Queen of Never’, ‘Coq Au Vin’ and ‘The Other End’, all of which will appear on ‘Cool’. Ryan wrote, recorded and mixed the album largely alone over the past two years, working in the gaps left by everyday life. That isolation gradually became part of the record’s character, with ideas allowed to grow stranger without anyone nearby to question them.

After years of adapting to other artists, Ryan describes Junior Pro as the result of turning the same restless approach towards their own songs. The project draws on a long history of moving between genres, from playing NOFX songs in Nebraska basements to performing Ellington standards at country clubs, studying at Berklee College of Music and later becoming part of Nashville’s independent pop community.

Ryan moved to Nashville in 2006 as one half of a duo with Madi Diaz. They later began recording and touring with a then little-known Kacey Musgraves, eventually serving as her musical director for around a decade. Ryan also produced ‘A Very Kacey Christmas’ and worked on Musgraves’ Christmas television special.

Natalie Prass, a long-time friend and collaborator, appears on the album’s title track. Elsewhere, ‘Cool’ reflects the less orderly side of Ryan’s musical background, combining the instincts of a producer, session musician and pop songwriter without forcing them into a single style.

Junior Pro calls it “maximalist, pop-in-a-blender,” which is probably as useful a description as any. ‘SPORTS!’ makes a convincing first introduction: compact, anxious and full of ideas that seem to arrive faster than the song can comfortably contain them.

Junior Pro Instagram
Easy Does It Records Website / Facebook / Instagram