Most artists who go viral with a debut single spend the next eighteen months chasing a follow-up album. Ryan Jillian Santiago, who performs as Royal & the Serpent, spent six years deferring hers on purpose, and the wait produced something stranger and more durable than a quick cash-in record ever could have.
The Bus Stop Beginning
Santiago wrote her first song as Royal & the Serpent, "Temperance," a cappella while walking to a bus stop, and self-released it in September 2017. The name itself was an accident, an Instagram handle born from her love of snakes that only later hardened into a thesis: Royal as the higher, connective self, the Serpent as the shadow side tied to depression and old drug use. "It felt more like it chose me than I selected it," she has said. Raised in New Jersey in a household she describes as "both Catholic and Jewish," and trained as a competitive dancer until a stage fall at 14 shattered both her heel plates, Santiago moved to Los Angeles at 18, tended bar, and took music seriously only after a co-worker pushed her toward it. That bartender still manages her career today.
Going Viral, Staying Put
A 2019 set at the Hollywood dive bar Good Times at Davey Wayne's got Atlantic Records' attention, and by year's end she had signed. Her label debut, "Overwhelmed," arrived June 26, 2020, a claustrophobic anthem built around the refrain "I get overwhelmed so easily" that landed with brutal timing during a year of pandemic isolation. SiriusXM's Alt Nation is credited as the first U.S. outlet to spin it, and TikTok did the rest.
The song went gold in the U.S. and Canada, reached No. 6 on Billboard's Alternative chart, and earned Santiago a spot in SiriusXM's Future Five for 2021. In February of that year, Atlantic packaged three outside remixes of the track, from Ookay, Marky Style featuring Mothica, and one credited to Chri$tian Gate$, the artist now known as Christian Gates. It arrived well over a year before his own signing to ONErpm, and roughly eighteen months after his and Santiago's paths had already crossed once, during a livestream-only pandemic show at the Roxy Theatre where PHEM headlined an empty venue and both artists opened. Christian Gates performed a song of his own called "Overwhelmed" that night, the same title, months after hers had already broken through.
Heaven, Hell and the Rat Trap Era
Rather than rush an album, Santiago spent 2020 through 2022 building out EPs, get a grip, Searching for Nirvana, If I Died Would Anyone Care and Happiness Is an Inside Job, staging her live shows in literal halves, Heaven and Hell, mapped onto the Royal and Serpent sides of her name. Then, in 2023 and 2024, she abandoned the EP model entirely for something odder: Rat Trap, a self-invented format releasing dual singles on a rolling monthly basis across five installments, The Blueprint, The Burn, The Band-Aid, The Burden and The Beginning, yielding tracks like "Junkie," "Slug" and "U Ruined Frank Ocean 4 Me."
She built a fanbase on refusing the record cycle everyone else was running.
Emptiness Is Godly, at Last
The payoff came May 8, 2026, when Atlantic released her debut full-length, Emptiness Is Godly, a 17-track concept record narrated by a fictionalized alter ego she calls "R," folding in 2025 standalones like "Death Do Us Part" and "Euphoria" alongside the March 2026 pre-release single "Steering (So Fast)."
The chaos and the calm.Melodic Magazine
That framing tracks with everything Santiago had already built. Her biggest streaming moment arrived outside the album cycle entirely: "Wasteland," her 2024 contribution to the Arcane Season 2 soundtrack, pulled more than 1.7 million Spotify streams in a single day that November and charted across a dozen countries, proof that her sound, dubstep drops and industrial texture wrapped around confessional lyricism with longtime co-producer Marky Style, travels well beyond the alt-pop clubs where she started.
The Wider Circle
Santiago's collaboration list reads like a map of the LA alt-pop scene of the 2020s: Gayle, The Knocks with Rivers Cuomo, Demi Lovato, and Jutes on 2023's "Punkstar." She shares a producer, Kill Dave, with KiNG MALA, a connection that places both artists inside the same dark-pop production ecosystem despite sitting on different labels. Touring took her from Yungblud's virtual dates in 2020 through arena support slots with Avril Lavigne and Fall Out Boy, into her own fall 2025 R.A.T.S. headline run and, this year, the Emptiness Is Godly Tour across the U.S. and Europe, including a stop on Twenty One Pilots' All Points East bill in London.
Six years is a long gap between a breakout single and a debut album by most industry math. For Royal & the Serpent it reads less like delay than design, a slow accumulation of EPs, singles and a fictional narrator sturdy enough to finally carry a record on her own terms.