Ryley Walker Signs to AD 93, Releases First New Song in Five Years

Ryley Walker has signed to AD 93. The singer-songwriter-guitarist marked the announcement with "Carrier," his first new music in five years and his first release since the 2021 album Course in Fable.

The track arrives with a video directed by Kendra Calhoun.

Walker described "Carrier" in press materials as a "clock-out jam" — a song he chipped away at after long shifts at his service industry job in New York. The image is deliberately unglamorous: a working musician writing on the margins of paid labor, not in the studio.

The song's cast of characters comes from home. "I was thinking of people in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois. Wearing SpongeBob pajama pants to a funeral-type heads," Walker said. "I imagined them screaming behind the wheel of a salvage-title Honda Civic with a lift kit. They inspire me every day."

The quote carries Walker's trademark voice — deadpan, specific, affectionate toward the Midwest oddballs he grew up around. The salvage-title Civic with a lift kit is not a metaphor he reaches for ironically; he names these people as a daily inspiration.

The five-year gap since Course in Fable does not mean Walker went quiet. He spent the intervening period working as a guitarist and collaborator with other artists. He has played guitar for james K and Joanne Robertson, and has collaborated with Charles Rumback, Steve Gunn, Chris Corsano, David Grubb, and more.

That roster reads like a map of the experimental and improvisational circles Walker moves in. Corsano is one of the most in-demand free-improvising drummers working today; Gunn and Rumback are longtime associates from Walker's Chicago-rooted orbit. The collaborations kept Walker in motion even when his own name was off the marquee.

The move to AD 93 gives Walker a new home after a career that has spanned labels including Dead Oceans and Husky Pants. AD 93, the London-based label founded by Nic Tasker, has built its identity around leftfield electronic and experimental artists, making Walker's signing a notable broadening of the imprint's guitar-songwriter wing.

For Walker, "Carrier" reopens a solo chapter that sideman work had paused. Whether the single points to a full-length follow-up to Course in Fable remains unannounced, but the label deal suggests the next five years will look different from the last.