Rio Romeo is a force of nature whose open-book honesty and unbounded curiosity have made them a 2020s cult hero. They’ve amassed more than 713,000 followers on TikTok, and their breakthrough single, the longing “Nothing’s New, ” has racked up more than 308 million streams on Spotify. With their new album Good Grief, they’re taking stock of their whirlwind last five years, which have included cross-country relocations, a new romance, a horrifying accident that resulted in brain and hip injuries—and the support of a fanbase that’s helped them not just survive, but thrive.
Good Grief brings together nine songs from Rio’s last five years. A companion piece to their 2022 EP Good God!, which contained “Nothing’s New, ” Good Grief shows how Rio’s songwriting and vocal skills have blossomed—their genre-fluid songs possess a musical-theater grandness while also vibrating with punk vitality and the righteousness of queer folk. “I’ve been waiting forever to put this project out,” they say.
“Forever” could mean all the way back to Rio’s childhood, when they were a fervent journaler who—because of their religious, homeschooled upbringing in southern California—quickly developed their autodidactic side. “It definitely was an isolating experience, but it was creatively motivating, ” Rio recalls of those early years. They were exposed to musicals at a very young age (“I now Identify as an escaped theater kid, ” they note) and eventually enrolled in an art-focused high school in Pomona, where they began focusing on their visual art practice while also realizing that they were “not the same, gender-wise, as other girls. “Rio then applied to and was accepted by the scene design program at DePaul University’s Theatre School.
“I ended up moving to Chicago at 18—and mind you, this entire time I’ve been living in a very conservative Christian environment,” they say. “Being gay was simply not an option. I get to Chicago, and I’m like, ‘Holy shit, this is so cool. I have independence. For the first time, I really get to figure out who I am and what I want and the people that I want to be friends with. ‘ I had some queer friends growing up, but it’s a red bubble within the larger blue California, so, I knew very few queer people.”
While Rio’s world had blown open in Chicago, they ultimately decided to leave university after a quarter and move home—until their parents found out that Rio was gay and kicked them out. Following a stint of couch-surfing and living in their car, Rio moved back to Chicago. Having lived in California all their life, Rio realized, led them to having “no fucking idea what people do in the winter” in sometimes-frigid Chicago. So Rio spent time back at DePaul, waiting for their friends to finish classes in piano-equipped rehearsal rooms on campus.
“I ended up playing the piano a lot, and coping with this really fucked-up situation—all of this transition and loss—through writing songs,” they say. Being able to write on their own and share songs on their own terms was liberating: “There was this secrecy that I could have with my music, where I could only choose to share it with people when I wanted to,” they say. “It was really empowering to be able to have choice, after not having any choice. “Rio recorded a project in 2018 but ended up not telling anyone about it. “It was there mostly for me to listen to and be like, ‘Yeah, I did this.'”
