Royal & the Serpent is the stage name of Ryan Jillian Santiago (born May 25, 1994), an American singer-songwriter raised in New Jersey who relocated to Los Angeles at 18 and has spent the years since building one of alt-pop's more durable one-woman catalogs for Atlantic Records: a 2020 pandemic-era breakout single, "Overwhelmed," that went RIAA Gold and spent 22 weeks on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart; a string of EPs and a self-invented singles format called Rat Trap; arena support runs with Demi Lovato, Fall Out Boy and Avril Lavigne; and, in May 2026, her long-deferred debut full-length, Emptiness Is Godly.
Santiago grew up in a household she has described as "both Catholic and Jewish," a duality she later said informs the visual and thematic "heaven and hell" framing of her live shows. As a child she trained as a competitive dancer from around age five, until an injury at 14, jumping off a stage during a performance and shattering both heel plates, ended that path and pushed her toward musical theater and, eventually, songwriting. She received her first guitar that same Christmas and began writing songs immediately. Her grandfather had worked as a touring drummer and multi-instrumentalist, and along with her parents' record collection, heavy on Fleetwood Mac and Simon & Garfunkel, he shaped her earliest musical ear.
A key early influence came from close to home: her childhood neighbor and family friend was singer-songwriter Donna Missal, now signed to Harvest Records. The two learned guitar together as kids, with Missal's younger sister teaching Santiago some of her first chords. Santiago's first concert, at age six, was Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again tour.
At 18, Santiago moved to Los Angeles, attended art school and worked as a bartender to get by. It was a co-worker from that bartending job who first encouraged her to pursue music professionally, and who has managed her career from the very start; she has called him "one of my best friends on Earth" and confirmed in interviews that he remains her manager. The stage name Royal & the Serpent began, by her own account, as an unplanned Instagram handle rooted in her love of snakes. Its now-famous duality, "Royal" as the higher, connective self and "the Serpent" as the shadow side tied to darkness, depression and past struggles with drug use, accrued meaning over time. As she has put it, the name "felt more like it chose me than I selected it."
Santiago's first release under the Royal & the Serpent name was "Temperance," self-released in September 2017 and written, she has said, a cappella while walking to a bus stop. She followed with "Together" (2018) and gained early attention as a featured vocalist on producer Tommee Profitt's "Wicked" (2018), used in the trailer for The Girl in the Spider's Web. Independent singles "Weddings & Funerals" and "Salvador Dali" built local buzz through 2019, and a live show that summer at the Hollywood dive bar Good Times at Davey Wayne's caught Atlantic Records' attention. She signed with the label by the end of 2019.
Her Atlantic debut single, "Overwhelmed," arrived June 26, 2020. A claustrophobic, high-anxiety anthem built around the refrain "I get overwhelmed so easily," it went viral on TikTok in the second half of 2020, its lyrics landing hard during a year of pandemic isolation. SiriusXM's Alt Nation is reported to have been the first U.S. outlet to play it, featuring the song on its Critical Cut program in July 2020. "Overwhelmed" ultimately went RIAA Gold in the U.S. and Music Canada Gold in Canada, spent 22 weeks on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart, and has been cited at well over 150 million cumulative streams.
Riding that momentum, Santiago released her debut EP, get a grip, on October 16, 2020, and joined English artist Yungblud's Weird Time of Life virtual tour as a supporting act that same year. By December 2020, SiriusXM named her to its Future Five for 2021 and included her in the network's inaugural Next Wave Concert Series.
Royal & the Serpent's music sits within alt-pop, dark pop, indie pop and electropop, and critics have variously described it as "dramatic alt-electro-pop" that blends pop, punk and alternative rock textures. Signature elements include dubstep-inspired drops and industrial-tinged production, often built with longtime co-producer Marky Style, layered against emotionally raw, confessional lyricism about anxiety, sensory overload, self-destructive tendencies, addiction and the duality of self that gives the project its name.
That duality extends into her live shows, which she has staged literally in two halves, "Heaven" and "Hell," mapping onto the Royal (light) and Serpent (shadow) halves of her persona. She has cited David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Stevie Nicks, Lauren Ruth Ward, alt-R&B artist Allan Rayman and 1950s doo-wop among her influences. On Emptiness Is Godly, reviewers describe the sound as swinging between delicate melody and brash emotion, anchored by a fictionalized narrator she calls "R" who carries the concept across the record's ballads and faster, more exhilarating alt-pop cuts.
After get a grip (self-released, October 2020), Santiago released three more Atlantic-era EPs: Searching for Nirvana (June 2021), If I Died Would Anyone Care (January 2022) and Happiness Is an Inside Job (October 2022). A limited-edition compilation, How to Grow a Rat, gathered songs from the latter two EPs and arrived in June 2023 during her Fall Out Boy tour run.
Rather than continue with a conventional album cycle, Santiago spent 2023 and 2024 releasing dual singles on a rolling monthly basis, packaged under a self-invented format called Rat Trap. Five installments, subtitled The Blueprint, The Burn, The Band-Aid, The Burden and The Beginning, produced tracks including "Astroturf," "One Nation Underdogs," "Junkie," "Slug," "Utopia," "Sweet Tooth," "U Ruined Frank Ocean 4 Me," "Separation Anxiety," "Oops," "American Spirit" and "Dog."
Her long-awaited debut studio album, Emptiness Is Godly, was released May 8, 2026, on Atlantic Records: a 17-track concept record narrated by the alter-ego character "R," exploring love, loss, self-awareness and regret. Melodic Magazine called it a collection defined by "the chaos and the calm," a description that echoes the heaven/hell framing Santiago has used since her earliest EPs. Standalone 2025 singles "Death Do Us Part," "Carry Me Home," "Euphoria" and "Young As This," plus the March 2026 pre-release single "Steering (So Fast)," were folded into the finished album.
"Overwhelmed" remains Santiago's signature commercial success. It is RIAA Gold-certified in the U.S. and Music Canada Gold-certified in Canada, reached No. 6 on Billboard's US Alternative chart and No. 20 on Billboard's US Rock chart (some outlets cite a No. 24 peak on a related tally), and spent 22 weeks on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart. Cumulative streams have been cited at over 150 million.
Her biggest single streaming moment to date came via a placement rather than a single release: "Wasteland," her 2024 contribution to the Arcane Season 2 (League of Legends) soundtrack, charted at No. 16 on the New Zealand Hot Singles chart and drove a sharp Spotify spike, pulling in more than 1.7 million streams in a single tracked day in late November 2024 and landing on viral or Top 200 charts across France, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Latvia. Her feature on The Knocks' "Sound the Alarm," alongside Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, reached No. 29 on the US Dance chart. She was also named to SiriusXM's Future Five for 2021 and its broader Class of 2021 of breakthrough artists.
Santiago's touring history moved from festival and support slots into headline runs across the 2020s. Early support dates included Yungblud's Weird Time of Life virtual tour (2020), Demi Lovato's Holy Fvck tour and grandson's Death of a Tour (both 2022), and Fall Out Boy's So Much (for) Stardust tour (2023). In 2024 she moved into arenas as support on Avril Lavigne's Greatest Hits Tour, playing rooms including Rogers Arena in Vancouver, the Kia Forum in Inglewood and the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
Her first-ever headline tour came in fall 2023, hitting venues like Nashville's Exit/In and Austin's Empire Control Room. A larger North American run, billed as the "1st ever R.A.T.S headline TOUR," followed in fall 2025, running from Phoenix in mid-October through a Los Angeles date at The Roxy in mid-November, with stops at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn and First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia along the way. Following the release of Emptiness Is Godly, she launched the Emptiness Is Godly Tour in June 2026 across U.S. cities including Austin, Dallas, Tucson and Los Angeles's El Rey Theatre, extending to UK and European dates that September in London, Manchester, Paris, Cologne and Amsterdam. She also supported Ashnikko on the Smoochies album tour in 2026 and played a slot on Twenty One Pilots' All Points East festival bill in London that August, alongside Wunderhorse, Ren, Gang of Youths and bbno$.
Festival credits include Firefly Festival and Emo Nite Vegas (2021), When We Were Young and BottleRock Napa Valley (2022), Good Things Festival in Australia (2023), Rock for People in Czechia and a performance at The Game Awards 2024 in Los Angeles, where she played "Wasteland" live. In 2025 she joined the revived Vans Warped Tour across stops in Washington D.C., Long Beach and Orlando, and played Austin City Limits.
One earlier date belongs to her Los Angeles come-up rather than her later headline era. During the COVID-era run of livestream-only concerts at The Roxy Theatre, PHEM headlined an empty-venue show with Royal & the Serpent and Christian Gates both opening; Christian Gates performed his own song "Overwhelmed" that night, the same title Royal & the Serpent had broken through with months earlier, well before the two ever formally worked together on record.
Santiago's most consistent collaborator across her catalog is her longtime co-producer Marky Style (Mark Gozman), present from the get a grip era onward. Beyond her own camp, she has featured on or written with a wide range of acts: Tommee Profitt's "Wicked" (2018), MELVV's "Nectarines" and J.Pollock's "Wild" (both 2020), Slush Puppy's "Eat Spit!" (2021), The Knocks' "Sound the Alarm" with Rivers Cuomo (2021), Gayle's "ABCDEFU" (2021) and later "Kinda Smacks" (2024), Beauty School Dropout's "Starphucker" (2021), Louis the Child's "Talk" and Stand Atlantic's "pity party" (both 2022), Demi Lovato's "Eat Me" and Sleeping with Sirens' "Be Happy" (2022), Mod Sun's "SOS" and Jutes's "Punkstar" (both 2023), and The Beaches' "Blame Brett" and Lindsey Stirling's "Inner Gold" (both 2024). Her friendship and creative partnership with Slush Puppy (Sam Catalano) has been ongoing since the "Eat Spit!" feature, extending to shared writing credits and a June 2026 tour date on which Slush Puppy, with Snow Wife, opened for Royal & the Serpent.
In February 2021, Atlantic released "overwhelmed (the remixes)," a single package pairing three outside producers with her breakout track: Ookay, Marky Style (featuring Mothica), and a remix credited to Chri$tian Gate$, Christian Gates. The Christian Gates remix, released with its own official music video, is confirmed across Apple Music, Shazam, YouTube's Atlantic-affiliated upload, SoundCloud and Deezer, all crediting him as remixer. It arrived roughly a year and a half after "Overwhelmed" first went viral and well over a year before Christian Gates's own signing to ONErpm.
Royal & the Serpent is also linked, at a production-network level, to KiNG MALA (Areli Castro): the two are not labelmates, KiNG MALA records for the independent Handwritten Records while Royal & the Serpent is signed to major label Atlantic, but they share a producer in Kill Dave, an LA-based writer/producer whose Position Music roster bio credits work with both acts alongside artists including Aespa, Joji, K. Flay, Tom Morello, Bülow, Hayley Kiyoko and Upsahl. Critics have also described KiNG MALA's sound in language similar to Royal & the Serpent's own dark-pop coverage, situating both within the same LA alt-pop production ecosystem of the mid-2020s.
Royal & the Serpent has been signed to Atlantic Records since late 2019, and her publishing sits with Universal Music Publishing Group. She has been managed since the outset of her career by the same person, the co-worker who encouraged her to pursue music while she was bartending in Los Angeles, whom she has described in interviews as one of her closest friends; she has not stated his name on the record in available interviews. For the Emptiness Is Godly album cycle, Atlantic's press contact was listed as Ted Sullivan.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Self-releases debut single "Temperance" as Royal & the Serpent. |
| 2018 | Features on Tommee Profitt's "Wicked," used in The Girl in the Spider's Web trailer. |
| 2019 | A show at Good Times at Davey Wayne's leads to a signing with Atlantic Records. |
| 2020 | "Overwhelmed" released June 26, goes viral on TikTok; debut EP get a grip follows in October; supports Yungblud's virtual tour. |
| 2021 | Atlantic releases "overwhelmed (the remixes)," including an official remix by Chri$tian Gate$ (Christian Gates) alongside Ookay and Marky Style versions; EP Searching for Nirvana arrives in June. |
| 2022 | EPs If I Died Would Anyone Care and Happiness Is an Inside Job released; supports Demi Lovato and grandson. |
| 2023 | First-ever headline tour; compilation How to Grow a Rat; Rat Trap singles series begins; supports Fall Out Boy; features on Jutes's "Punkstar." |
| 2024 | "Wasteland" lands on the Arcane Season 2 soundtrack and becomes her biggest streaming moment; supports Avril Lavigne's Greatest Hits Tour; performs at The Game Awards. |
| 2025 | "1st ever R.A.T.S headline TOUR" across North America; plays revived Vans Warped Tour and Austin City Limits. |
| 2026 | Releases debut album Emptiness Is Godly (May 8); launches the Emptiness Is Godly Tour across the U.S. and Europe; supports Ashnikko; plays Twenty One Pilots' All Points East. |
She was born Ryan Jillian Santiago on May 25, 1994, and raised in New Jersey before moving to Los Angeles at 18.
Santiago has described the song as being about "needing to be in control of everything," written during a period of genuine anxiety and sensory overload. Released June 26, 2020, it went viral on TikTok later that year, went RIAA Gold in the U.S. and Music Canada Gold in Canada, and spent 22 weeks on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart.
Yes. She signed with Atlantic Records in late 2019 after a show at the Hollywood dive bar Good Times at Davey Wayne's, and remains with the label as of her 2026 debut album.
It is her debut studio album, released May 8, 2026, on Atlantic Records: a 17-track concept record narrated by a fictionalized alter-ego character named "R," exploring love, loss, self-awareness and regret.
Santiago has said the acronym, from "Royal And The Serpent," began as an accident when someone on an A&R team abbreviated her name that way in an email. She initially disliked it before embracing it as the backbone of her rat-themed visual branding, including the How to Grow a Rat compilation and the Rat Trap singles series.
Yes, in a limited but documented way. In February 2021, Atlantic released an official Chri$tian Gate$ remix of "Overwhelmed" as part of a three-producer remix package. The two had also previously appeared on the same bill during the COVID era, when PHEM headlined a livestream-only show at The Roxy Theatre with both Royal & the Serpent and Christian Gates opening, and Christian Gates performed his own song, also titled "Overwhelmed," that night.
| Title | Metric | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Overwhelmed | RIAA Gold (U.S.) | Also Music Canada Gold; 22 weeks on Billboard Alternative Airplay |
| Overwhelmed | Chart peak | No. 6 US Alternative, No. 20 US Rock (Billboard) |
| Overwhelmed | Cumulative streams | Cited at over 150 million |
| Wasteland (Arcane S2) | Daily streams | Over 1.7 million streams in a single day, late November 2024, per Kworb.net |
| Wasteland | Chart peak | No. 16, New Zealand Hot Singles |
| Sound the Alarm (feat.) | Chart peak | No. 29, US Dance (Billboard) |
| Year | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | get a grip | EP (self-released) |
| 2021 | Searching for Nirvana | EP (Atlantic) |
| 2022 | If I Died Would Anyone Care | EP (Atlantic) |
| 2022 | Happiness Is an Inside Job | EP (Atlantic) |
| 2023 | How to Grow a Rat | Compilation LP (Atlantic) |
| 2023–2024 | Rat Trap 1–5 | Dual-single series |
| 2026 | Emptiness Is Godly | Studio album (Atlantic) |
Further reading: for more on the LA dark-pop and alt-pop network Royal & the Serpent's work intersects with, see the wiki entries for KiNG MALA, Jutes and Christian Gates, whose own breakout period briefly overlapped with hers around the 2021 "Overwhelmed" remix and a shared COVID-era Roxy livestream bill. In the COVID-recovery stretch of 2021, after Christian Gates’s official remix of “Overwhelmed” came out, Royal & the Serpent ran with a tight LA alt-and-rock circle, Poutyface, phem, Slush Puppy, Beauty School Dropout, Christian Gates, the crew hanging together often and throwing parties at On The Rocks on the Sunset Strip.