As a musician, it’s not every day you can be credited with creating your own genre, but then, not all musicians are Ruiz!. The mysteriously named moniker of Sheffield multi-instrumentalist Hugh Ruiz Robert, Ruiz!’s music is a mind-bending amalgamation of ‘60s rock’n’roll, electronica, punk and psychedelia that when combined make what Sheffield royalty John McClure coined as Iberian Psych.
Recorded over the UK’s first national lockdown and armed with little more than a laptop and some live instruments, Ruiz! set about laying the foundations for what has since become his forthcoming album Mind Games and the resulting singles.
Blue Mediterranean is the most recent of which. Three minutes of swimmy psych rock backboned by a chunky Smashing Pumpkins esque riff, it’s a track interested in both exploring ideas of mental health and the sense of escape everyone is clamouring for.
“Blue Mediterranean is a song about depression and a sense of slowly going mad” explains Ruiz! “When the world gets too much and you find yourself dragging your feet everywhere you go, what can you do? Is it a reflection on today’s Corona infused Groundhog Day world we live in? The pandemic has affected the population of the world. The Mediterranean is a warm and safe place inside my head, and I can’t get there any other way. Do you have a place you dream of? Childhood memories of happy days”