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Don’t let the namesake fool you – Minute After Midnight was born from a single spark, one mind that refused to dim, one pulse that kept humming long after the world felt quiet. Behind the name is Derrick Ryan: the architect, the preacher, the restless spirit pulling universes out of shadows. And while a full band now breathes oxygen into the live show, the heartbeat began alone.

It didn’t start in a club, nor in a studio, nor under the glow of a crackling needle on vinyl. It started with wheels on pavement. “Skateboarding got me into the local hardcore scene in Knoxville, so that was kind of like my first introduction to music,” he recalls. The first concert he ever saw was NSYNC – “you’d never expect that” – but origins are rarely prophetic. Destiny reveals itself sideways.

Ryan wasn’t born into music; he collided with it. Walking into early local shows, he found himself captivated not by chords or melodies, but by human electricity. “Admiring the crowd control these people had… I guess it kind of evolved into, oh, I just want to be in a band,” he remembers.

He made the rounds – steel strings in three or four bands, a brief flirtation with EDM, even “country at one point” – before the identity finally crystallized. Minute After Midnight was the container big enough for everything.

“I went solo for a while… I ended up recording the music, then going to find members later,” he admits. It created a paradox: a solo project with communal bones, a one-man vision pumped full of band chemistry. But most of all, the name stuck. “I think Minute After Midnight sounds way cooler than Derrick Ryan,” he laughs.

And he was right; it sounds like a name printed in bold on an old-school Warped Tour poster, a name destined for festival lineups and back patches. But this story is not nostalgia. It’s genesis.

The name arrived like a strange visitation. “Interestingly enough, [it] kind of came out of nowhere,” Ryan recalls. His friend Matt Smile bet him “10 grand that it’s already a band name,” a bet Ryan refused to shake on, though Smile “would have been good by it.” But fate didn’t wait for permission.

Another sign followed. After producing with longtime friend Cameron Mazel and connecting with Ashton through recording sessions, the universe intervened. “He was like, ‘bro, you need to come work with Matt Good,’” Ryan reflects. But flying to Phoenix? It wasn’t on his agenda. Ryan hated flying. So he asked the universe for another sign.

The cosmic obliged: a simple painting on his wall that said “GO.” That was enough. One plane ride later and he was in the studio with Matt Good – the mind behind early From First to Last, the fingerprints behind Escape The Fate, Memphis May Fire, The World Alive, Blessthefall, and constellation of scene staples.

The collaboration birthed his breakout song “GHOST.” A haunting little ember that turned wildfire.

Today, “GHOST” sits at over 7 million streams, but a viral track so early on can quickly turn into a creative nightmare. “There’s a lot of pressure to make another ‘GHOST,’ and it’s like I can’t… it’s its own thing,” he admits. The fear isn’t failure. It’s expectation. “There’s always kind of like this chip on my shoulder… is this going to be as good as ‘GHOST?’… I don’t know what people want,” he says.

His only compass? Resonance. “If it resonates with me… I like to imagine it will resonate with listeners,” he tells me. Emotional truth is his refuge. His songwriting unspools the knots in his chest; its catharsis disguised as melody. “I think keeping it is more unhealthy… it’s an outlet for me as well, as I know I’m helping listeners,” he says.

His newest single, “Masochist,” sharpens that vulnerability into a diamond tip. He stretches the definition of the word – not to glamorize pain, but to understand it. “I’m not promoting that in any form or shape,” he clarifies. Instead, he digs into the darker corners of numbness, trauma, and self recognition. “I do deal with a darkness myself… I still find myself getting sad,” he confesses. “After you go through so much, you do become numb… and when you feel pain… it’s kind of like, oh, at least I’m still alive.”

He wrote “Masochist” as a dance track for people lost in their own shadows, a way to move the body while excavating the mind.

But excavation has a cost. “I get burnout all the time… I do get exhausted and overwhelmed,” he admits. His antidotes are simple: the gym, video games, and the very thing that brought him into the scene, “Skateboarding… when you’re skateboarding, if you’re not fully locked in that moment, you’ll fall and hurt yourself.” He’s searching for reprieve in anything that pulls him out of spirals and back into the world. “Anything that can take me out of my head into the world… that’s what I look for,” he says.

Ryan’s vision for Minute After Midnight isn’t reinvention. It’s reclamation. “I see myself bringing back the nostalgia that we had in 2008… I want to go even more raw,” he explains.

He’s allergic to the sterile gloss of AI-generated music. “With AI, everything is getting so digitalized… I think people are going to really lean more towards less tuned vocals and real guitar tracks,” he predicts. He speaks bluntly about the thread: “It’s just stealing from all of the art that we created.” His plea is simple: “Please separate the AI music from the real music… and lower streaming royalties.”

But beneath the industry concerns is a deeper message, one he wants every listener to inhale: “I just want [people] to believe in themselves,” he says.

And then he expands it into something big enough to live in: “If it’s on your heart… if you refuse to let failure get to you… this can also happen for you… don’t be so hard on yourself… stay true to the music you love… and love one another.”

Minute After Midnight is not just rising. It’s erupting.

“Masochist” is out now. The Fearless Records era has begun. And with a vault full of unreleased tracks waiting for their moment, Derrick Ryan’s future is already glowing at the edges.

He says it best, with the quiet wonder of someone waking inside the life he used to daydream about:

“If you really bust your ass, someday you can wake up in a dream… and that’s kind of what my life is starting to feel like now.”