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Ruth B. VibeZ

"Lost Boy" started as a six-second Vine and became a platinum single. Twenty tracks show that Ruth B. was never a one-song artist.

Edmonton to everywhere, via a six-second video

Ruth Berhe was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Ethiopian parents, and became briefly famous in the strangest way available in 2015: she posted a few seconds of an improvised song about Peter Pan to Vine, and the response was large enough that she finished writing it. "Lost Boy" went multi-platinum.

Then something more interesting happened. "Dandelions" — an album track from 2017 that nobody promoted — went viral on TikTok years after release and became by some measures her biggest song, a genuinely unusual second act. It has since accumulated the kind of streaming numbers most artists never see once.

Her music is piano-led singer-songwriter pop with a strong melodic sense and a plainness of language that reads as sincerity rather than simplicity. She writes her own material, which in this lane is worth stating.

What to listen for

"Dandelions" is the one to start with and a good demonstration of why the internet found it: an unguarded love song built on a single repeated piano figure, with a chorus that sounds like it has always existed.

"Superficial Love" and "Mixed Signals" come from the earlier, sharper period. "2 Poor Kids" is the most autobiographical and the best piece of writing here.

"Golden" and "Crave" show the later, more produced direction. "Unrighteous" and "Die Fast" are where she pushes hardest vocally.

"Paper Airplanes" from the A Jazzman's Blues soundtrack is the outlier — a period piece for a Tyler Perry film, produced by D'Mile, and considerably more soulful than the rest of her catalogue.

The features — Lyn Lapid on "do u really?" and gnash on "imagine if" — place her firmly in the world of internet-native singer-songwriters.

Go deeper

Safe Haven (2017) is the debut album and the strongest single body of her work.

For the lane: Lizzy McAlpine, Gracie Abrams and Lyn Lapid are the contemporaries, and dodie the British parallel — all artists who built audiences through platforms rather than radio.

The broader story here is worth noticing: two of Ruth B.'s biggest moments came from platforms rather than promotion, six years apart, and neither was planned. That is now a normal career shape, and the industry still has not entirely worked out what to do about it.

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