Levi Ryan is redefining Southern Gothic   

Content warning for mentions of dark topics and sexual assault. 

The eclectic musician and vocalist Levi Ryan of Houston, Texas came onto the scene on the cusp of the 2020s, with daring visions which would only become more realized and less compromised with time and experimentation. He jumps from emo and cloud rap to drum and bass, alternative R&B and alternative rock, but stays rather consistent with his lyrical contents and visuals: combining the long-standing horrors of American imperialism while embracing a fresh coat of digital Southern Gothic paint. 
 
Before we can talk fully about Levi Ryan’s music, we need to define the genre of Southern Gothic. Southern Gothic evolved from a solely literary movement in the 19^th century protesting against the conditions of America, especially the South, at the time while using the larger Gothic genre as a skeleton. They expressed this disdain with transgressive and graphic depictions of taboo subject material of the time such as racism, sexism, homophobia, class struggles, religious critiques, physical and mental illness and political corruption. These writers use techniques such as juxtaposition, gallows humor, disturbing absurdism and harsh matter-of-fact statements to get their points across. 

There have been many artists before Levi Ryan who have translated Southern Gothic into other artistic mediums such as, in Ryan’s case, music. Take dream pop musician Nicole Dollanganger and experimental musician Ethel Cain for example. Both are more contemporary examples of bringing transgressive, jarring and morbid subject material such as the violence of the patriarchy and past traumas set under an American backdrop to music. You could argue that cloud rapper Black Kray is also Southern Gothic with how he depicts surviving in Virginia with trauma and mental illness. 
 
What Levi Ryan does differently than many other artists who might fit under the Southern Gothic label is embracing the Information Age’s digital medium, both sonically and visually, while also incorporating history such as artifacts and war events to make sense of it all.  
 
There are myriad examples of Southern Gothic influence within Ryan’s discography, but one of the most pressing examples is 2023’s “generation x” from “operation wandering soul.” The music video for the song as posted on SoundCloud was delisted for “YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” If you read the lyrics, you’d understand why without needing to watch the video.  
 
If “raped by the machine, we’re just money and flesh” and “kill the meaning of life, fucking blame it on us” from the first verse wasn’t enough to convince you, try “his mouth on a gun ‘cause it’s his life to take.” The point is that these lyrics are extremely graphic and visceral: exactly some of the themes Southern Gothic art portrays. 
 
Some of his other music videos, however, are still available to view on YouTube. The one that best encapsulates what Levi Ryan’s music is about is “a life of service.” This music video shoves in guitar playing with a gas mask on, the iconography of Jesus Christ, older pop culture, wartime footage, old-school porn, a gun collection and even a newspaper clipping about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — all with glitching effects when the breakbeat plays. Needless to say, the apocalyptic feel of the video is present.  
 
The lyrics touch on generational trauma with a reference to someone else’s gunshot wound being extracted by the grieving protagonist. If this collage of images and sounds doesn’t scream “digital age Southern Gothic,” what would? 

A debatably even more controversial music video, however, is “marian dogma.” As the lyrics are about playing God and giving the protagonist (who says they’ll become Jesus Christ) life, the music video shows a gravedigger abducting a corpse and dragging the body to a table to brand it, giving it a crown of thorns as Jesus Christ wore and electrocuting it. As damage is inflicted on the corpse, the video glitches out. Then the tortured corpse is revealed to be Levi Ryan himself. This parallels Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic “Frankenstein” with Dr. Frankenstein playing God with the monster he created. 
 
If you want a more holistic, thematic view, 2024’s “soviet winter” is the most cohesive. This album covers themes such as how technology has changed how we view the world, losing a loved one to drug addiction and the anger from how someone killed themselves. It also tackles sexuality and romantic struggles such as objectification, codependency, the complications of masculinity, sexual trauma and becoming nihilistic over someone losing their virginity to someone supposedly evil. There’s a lot to unpack with this album, but it’s undeniably Southern Gothic in nature. 
 
Even Ryan’s latest output has Southern Gothic tendencies. 2025’s “southern comfort EP” features a pornographic cover art and lyrics under the YouTube upload but with selected words like “suicide,” “gun,” “fucked” and “rapes” censored, likely to evade Community Guideline restrictions. Ryan, however, isn’t the type of person to fold so easily to the will of corporations without expressing himself on his terms. Such is the life of a Southern Gothic-style artist. 
 
Levi Ryan is an artist who has endured and learned an incredible amount; it shows in his evolution as an artist. Regardless of his future art, it is without a doubt that he’s already ushering in a new era of Southern Gothic focused on and using the power of the Internet.