Ruby Haunt Reached 280 Million Streams Without a Label
The press photograph for the new record shows two men sitting on a leather sofa in an ordinary front room, shot on film with the frame edge left visible. Nobody is styled. There is a dead branch in a vase behind them and a rug that came with the house. For a duo about to release their eleventh album, it is a remarkably unambitious piece of staging, and that is the point.
Ruby Haunt have built a catalogue of 280 million streams without ever leaving the plain presentation they started with. Paper Halo, ten songs self-released on 16 September, arrives with the same direction as everything before it: no label, no repositioning, no attempt to look like a bigger act than they are.
The Lo-Fi Video Is a Decision, Not a Budget
Every single gets an official video, and they are all simple. Victor Pakpour has said the pair have always loved their lo-fi, simple videos, which is worth taking at face value rather than reading as a euphemism for cheap.
A band at 280 million streams can afford a treatment. Choosing not to commission one is a positioning choice: it keeps the visual register matched to music that is hushed and nocturnal, and it avoids the mismatch that happens when a modest record is given a glossy campaign. The image and the sound stay the same size.
It also compounds over eleven records. A consistent visual direction maintained for a decade becomes a recognisable identity in a way that any single expensive video cannot, and it costs nothing to sustain. The plainness is the brand, and it was free.
Eleven Albums From a Friendship That Started at Thirteen
Wyatt Ininns and Victor Pakpour have been close friends since they were thirteen. That is the structural fact behind the output: eleven albums since their 2015 debut Hurt is roughly one a year, sustained across a decade, which almost no band manages on a label release schedule.
Ininns has described making music together as really healing, and said it produces a huge sense of relief. Read alongside the release rate, that reads less like promotional language than like an explanation of the method: a project that functions as a standing arrangement between two friends does not have to wait for a campaign window, an A&R sign-off or a marketing calendar.
The DIY approach has, in their own description, never wavered. Eleven records is long past the point where that could be circumstantial. It is the operating model.
What Changes Between Records, and What Does Not
The consistency in presentation sits on top of a deliberate inconsistency in sound. “We try to start every album with some different sonic identity than the previous record,” Pakpour has said, adding that they have become “more open and comfortable with not overthinking the production, and if a song feels right, we just leave it.”
For Paper Halo the starting point was hardware. “Something felt fresh and fun using lots of classic drum machines on the new record,” Pakpour said, which gives the album a rhythmic spine rather than the drifting pulse a dream-pop record often defaults to.
That combination, a fixed visual identity with a moving sonic one, is the inverse of how most acts operate. The usual pattern is a stable sound and a rebuilt image every cycle. Doing it the other way round keeps a returning listener oriented while giving them something they have not heard.
Writing That Arrives Before It Is Understood
Ininns describes the lyric process as largely unconscious at the point of writing. “Most of the time the lyrics and melody just sort of spill out, and then I spend time figuring out what they’re actually trying to say.”
That order matters for what the record ends up being about. Paper Halo is described as ten songs about memory, transformation and the spaces we return to in search of ourselves, which is a theme that would sound schematic if it had been decided first and filled in afterwards. Arrived at in retrospect, it reads as something the songs turned out to share.
The opener, “Big Room”, was the first single and is described as a meditation on longing, repetition and the search for something just out of reach. The second single, “Wish”, followed. Both pair a bigger, more immediate sound with the hushed nocturnal atmosphere that has defined the duo’s work throughout.
What 280 Million Streams Means Without a Label
The number is the part of this story that changes how the rest reads. A self-released catalogue at that scale is a business with no intermediary taking a share of the recording revenue, which is a materially different position from an act with comparable numbers on a label deal.
It does not mean the money is large. Streaming pays per play at rates that make 280 million streams a comfortable living rather than a fortune, particularly split two ways across a decade. What it does mean is that the decisions are theirs: the release date, the artwork, the video budget, the choice not to overthink a production, and the choice to put out a record roughly every year.
It also explains the absence of a rebrand. A label campaign has to justify its spend, which usually means a visible change the marketing can point at. A duo funding their own release has no such requirement, and the plain sofa photograph is what that looks like in practice. The same logic sits behind other artists treating output volume as the statement, as with D Signature building Miles as a twenty-three-track release rather than a calling card.
Why an Album a Year Compounds on Streaming
The release cadence is doing quiet work that the stream total makes visible. On a platform that surfaces music through algorithmic recommendation, a catalogue of eleven albums behaves very differently from a catalogue of three.
The mechanics are straightforward. Every track is a separate entry point, and each one that finds a listener pulls the rest of the catalogue into their recommendations. A back catalogue this size means that a single song landing on a playlist does not produce one streak of plays and then stop; it opens a door onto ten more records that already exist and are already available. An act with three albums and a four-year gap between them has far fewer of those doors, and the ones they have go cold between cycles.
That is the structural reason Ruby Haunt’s numbers look the way they do without any of the usual amplifiers. There is no label playlist team, no radio campaign and no rebrand pushing a single release into visibility. What there is instead is a decade of continuous supply, and on streaming continuous supply is itself a distribution strategy.
It also changes what a new album has to achieve. When a record is the only thing an act has released in three years, it carries the entire weight of the cycle and its commercial failure is the cycle’s failure. When it is the eleventh in ten years, it can be exactly what it is: ten songs made because the two people making them wanted to, released when they were finished. Paper Halo is not required to break the band, which is precisely the freedom that lets the production stay unfussed and the staging stay plain.
The Rooms They Are Taking It To
The release is followed by West Coast dates, a Mexico City show and a European run in 2027. For a self-releasing duo that is a considered routing rather than a market-by-market rollout: the places where a decade of streaming has produced an audience large enough to fill a room.
Ininns has been direct about what the live shows are for. “Being in a room with people, especially in places like Mexico City and Europe that feel so special, makes it sink in how amazing it is to connect with people through music.” For a project built almost entirely on recordings made between two friends, the concert is the only point at which the audience becomes visible.
Both have a recommended setting for the record, and the two answers are almost identical. Pakpour suggests dusk hour on a train ride with headphones on. Ininns suggests headphones, looking out of the window of a bus or plane, or walking around observing the world, preferably at sunset or late at night. After eleven albums, they still agree on what the music is for. Full interview at The Luna Collective, with the Big Room video at Post-Punk.com.
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