Ryn Weaver – Odin St

Jackie closes out our year of throwbacks with an artist we haven’t heard from since 2014…

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[6.45]Jackie Powell: After all of these years, Ryn Weaver’s voice remains so singular in this sometimes bloated pop music world. I often think about The Fool as an album ahead of its time — it’s not a coincidence that “Octahate” was co-written by Charli XCX, who had a mainstream breakthrough in 2024, or that pop stars like Chappell Roan who sing about life’s romantic messes have been having a moment in the 2020s. While I still long for the bombastic and angst-laden chorus of “Octahate” or the bright instrumentals on “Pierre,” “Odin St” is refreshing. It’s written more like a screenplay than a typical pop song; imagine an indie slice-of-life romantic dramedy that doesn’t end well, or a more rustic and messier version of La La Land about how confounding the LA pop music scene is. Weaver has explained that the autobiographical premise describes the time when she left her label, moved across the country, and was trying to figure out what was next — a figuring-out period that would typically be glossed over in a conversation or written biography, or compressed into a montage in a film. “Odin St” is part of Weaver’s montage, but it hits a gray area: not too sunny and unrealistic, but not incredibly depressing either. The melody and tone stay the same when the track oscillates from verse to chorus, but there are slight lyrical changes and vowel intonations that move the song along rather than keep it on a hamster wheel. I hope “Odin St” becomes a beginning for Weaver, rather than just another blip for an artist that clearly is visionary when she chooses to be.
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Claire Davidson: Ryn Weaver has the kind of rich, imposing alto that makes a bouncier track like “Odin St” a tough sell. Imagine Florence Welch attempting to ground a lightweight power pop track, and you have something like the disconnect that emerges here. What’s worse, “Odin St” has no sense of balance among its disparate parts. The verses’ chugging electric guitar is all snarl and no melody, and is forced to compete with a rhythm section that’s placed at nearly the exact same volume as both the riffs and Weaver’s tremulous vocals. The song’s lyrical arc, following Weaver as she grows beyond the constraints of a relationship that leaves her wanting, feels muted for how determined the track is to sound hardened, with no crescendo or dramatic build. Weaver’s tenacity is impressive, but “Odin St.” is hardly the triumphant comeback she needs.
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Joshua Lu: The fact that “Odin St” exists at all is incredible. In the full decade since her debut project, the years have been rough, filled with broken promises, deleted tweets, and indefinite record label-related mess. The fact that “Odin St” is listenable is even more of a triumph — these sorts of comebacks tend to underwhelm, and there are plenty of mid-2010s alternative acts who have struggled to release worthwhile music as the years passed and budgets dried up. And yet “Odin St” exists and is genuinely great: part thunderous and part tender, and filled with rolling melodies embellished with tinges of baroque pop. Maybe the wait was worth it.
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Nortey Dowuona: Nice to see Constantine Anastasakis, another Long Island native, making waves in the music industry. In contrast to his work on Anna Shoemaker’s “Hey Anna” — a production with Jeff Bhasker bass leveling every other piece of the mix and Shoemaker’s voice a reedy cry struggling to cut through — “Odin St” is lithe. The bassline cannot drain the song, and Ryn Weaver’s foggy voice ripples at the top of the mix, allowing the drums to hammer down, pushed back in the mix but able to strike during the bridge and chorus. He’s still on SoundBetter — hit him up before it gets taken down.
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Leah Isobel: I like the depiction of having a flop major-label debut as a torrent of degradation and falsity, but these guitars are way too stodgy and sleepy to fully sell it.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Chugs in one gear, Weaver’s voice mud in the treads.
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Ian Mathers: I had to look up some other Ryn Weaver songs to hear whether that’s actually clumsy effects/processing/whatever making her vocals feel oddly garbled, or just her voice (it didn’t sound like something that could be natural, but you never know). Not only does it appear to be the former, but the comparison proves my other knee-jerk reaction correct: She has a lovely voice, just not quite as much here. If that effect felt deliberate or added much to “Odin St” that’d be one thing, but instead it just seems like the song never got properly mastered. That gives it kind of a hard ceiling, score-wise.
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Hannah Jocelyn: I had my issues with this one at first. I thought the production obscured the quirks in Ryn Weaver’s vibrato — the appeal of “Octahate” and “Pierre” was how well the zany production accentuated her eccentricity, and something so lumbering didn’t felt like it did her justice. But there’s something about that chord progression that kept me going back to this song; it never quite goes where my ear expects it to, and I like being wrongfooted by something that’s deceptively a simple pop song. It takes listening past all the processing and the distorted guitars, but Weaver is still there, irreverent as ever, especially when she growls about a “raven-haired daddy just ravaging me!” 
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Alfred Soto: She has a sense of arm-thrown-in-the-air histrionics of prime Florence Welch, though the guitars coil around the vocal instead of pointing outward. I have patience for songs that dramatize themselves instead of real-world referents.
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Jel Bugle: It sounds kinda wonky, an obvious attempt at something “big,” but the bits don’t quite fit, slightly tangled up.
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Taylor Alatorre: The true mark of maturity here is found not in the sonics, which hover frustratingly around a merely aspirational maturity, but in the delayed gratification of the ending. “These things don’t tend to end up happily” is the kind of anti-joke anti-climax that’s hard to keep close to the vest amid three minutes of dramatized quarter-life languishing. Credit to Ryn for knowing the art of the self-puncturing understatement.
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