RUTH

There is a kind of voice the music industry never quite knows what to do with: too big to ignore, too restless to file neatly under one label, the kind that fills a room before the first line is even finished.

Ruth Lorenzo has carried one of those voices her whole life, and RUTH is the project where she finally stopped shrinking it to fit someone else's plan.

Most of Britain first heard that voice in 2008. On the fifth series of The X Factor she turned two rock covers into something close to legend: a towering "Purple Rain" that people still trade clips of today, and a version of Bon Jovi's "Always" that took a stadium anthem and made an entire country lean in. For a few months the UK fell for her completely, and it fell for the rocker she already was.

Soon after, she signed a recording contract with Virgin, one of the biggest record labels in the world, and began work on her first album. It should have been the start of everything. 

But Virgin's parent company, EMI, had just been bought by new owners and was going through a difficult, chaotic period, and in 2010 her contract was dropped, along with the album she had almost finished. Rather than keep fighting inside all that noise, she went back home to Spain to catch her breath and find steady ground again.

What came next she built in full view of the people who loved her: Eurovision in 2014, years of television and live performing, a life lived generously and out loud. The industry did what it so often does with a woman who can sing, steering her toward pop, the genre with the surest commercial return, and it was never quite the right coat for her. Her audience, though, heard what was underneath all along. 

They had already named themselves the Lions, after the roar at the top of her range, and even through her most polished pop years they kept showing up for exactly that. Their instinct, it turns out, was right from the beginning.

The turning point came in 2022, when Nicolas Martinez de la Fuente became her manager and saw, at first glance, the rock artist standing in plain sight. Together they built RUTH from nothing, on her terms and no one else's, financed independently through her own label, Bakers Ink, so that creative control would never leave her hands again. For the Lions, it was less a surprise than a confirmation of the voice they had always heard.

The band

When Ruth set out to build the band, she turned to Raúl de Lara to help her find the right musicians. His timing was perfect: the beloved Murcia group Second was winding down, and he saw the chance to introduce her to players from that same close-knit local scene who suddenly had room for something new. Some of them she already knew, among them Sergio Bernal, now on drums, who had once been her own drum teacher back when she was first playing rock around Murcia. Nando Robles, who had played bass in Second itself, came in on bass, with David Lozano on guitar and Ricardo Ruiz on keys, and with Ruth holding a clear vision of exactly what she wanted, she steered the five of them in a single direction until the chemistry simply happened on its own.

BlackSheep

Their debut was made the way records were made before anyone learned to hide behind a screen: live, all in the room together, straight to analogue tape, at the Real World Studios that Peter Gabriel built into the countryside outside Bath. Recording that way leaves nowhere to hide and nothing to tidy up afterward, so what the band plays is exactly what you hear, take after honest take. Rafa Sardina engineered the sessions, and Sylvia Massy, whose credits run from Tool and System of a Down to Johnny Cash and Prince, handled the mix and the master. Ruth Lorenzo produced the album with Emilio Esteban and shared executive duties with Nicolas Martinez de la Fuente, an award-winning creative director who helped her give the record its shape and its vision. Paid for and released entirely on her own terms, with no outside label in the room, what remains is eleven songs in English, a black sheep on the sleeve, and one conviction beneath all of it: that the thing which sets you apart is not something to hide.

It opens raw, with "I Hate My Life" and the teenage choir of the Alice Cooper Solid Rock Teen Foundation, then swings through the hard rock of "Sticks & Stones," the controlled fury of "The Game" and the punk bite of "Hey" before dropping into the bare blues of "Cry." From there it rises toward the orchestral swell of "Don't Break My Heart" and the slow climb of "Carry Me Home," gathering strings, choirs and a welcome layer of grit along the way, and letting a voice like hers finally stretch across the full range it was built for. MondoSonoro scored it seven out of ten and Stairway to Rock eighty out of a hundred, though the record's truest measure is the crowd that sings every word back.

On tour

RUTH is on tour through 2026 and into 2027. All the confirmed dates, venues and tickets are on the tour page.

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