new single “Pockets” and music video from Colorado born singer-songwriter Riley Max

Riley Max is a 21-year-old singer-songwriter and multimedia artist from Colorado. Her debut album ROY G BIV – recorded at just 18 years old – received widespread acclaim, and her second album is set to release this fall. She is a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies Art, Film and Visual Studies. She is also the music director of The Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones, and appears in a wide variety of musical theater productions. Her penchant for storytelling stems from an early love of 90s rom-coms and childhood exposure to copious amounts of 80s music, and extends beyond just music. Her background as a cover artist and comic creator for the Harvard Independent pairs with her skills as a composer to serve as the basis of her undergraduate thesis this coming year, which will take the form of a fully animated short film. Her upcoming music video for Year One contains an animated segment that is currently on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, in their exhibit No Slop, No Second Screen: Animation–the hard-won image.

Her new single “Pockets” is a folk-drenched indie pop embrace. She shares, “In a lot of ways, Pockets really does feel like the culmination of the three years since I last had a big release. Making ROYGBIV was super fun, and I was free to experiment however I wanted, but I wasn’t quite sure what I liked and didn’t like yet, so I relied a lot on input from those around me when creating the musical accompaniment to go with my lyrics. Pockets, on the other hand, is quintessentially me. I started writing Pockets after my freshman year of college, having grown apart from somebody that I will always really appreciate having had in my life. And then I sat on it for a while, unsure of where to go with it. But I came back to it after going through a bit of a rebuilding period, and I wrote the second verse. And then I sat on it for another year, until I finally finished the song after going through a pretty rough bout of anxiety between my sophomore and junior year. Ultimately, I realized that there are a lot of things I can point to at any given stage in my life that I’m really grateful for, and although I hadn’t quite realized it yet, that was the premise that I had been building on for the last three years as I wrote this song. After that, the music just fell into place.”