Ritt Momney - BASE
2026 • SELF-RELEASED • INDIE / BEDROOM POP / R&B
70/100
Ritt Momney called this record BASE. He’s chasing stability, something solid to stand on, while the rest of the signal degrades around him. The album runs hot and compressed, synths crackling at the edges, vocals filtered like they’re trying to reach you through a weathered screen door. Clean acoustic notes surface every so often, brief flashes of sincerity before the production swallows them again.
That tension makes more sense with the backstory. After his cover of “Put Your Records On” quietly racked up hundreds of thousands of streams, Jack Rutter found himself drifting from music instead of toward it. BASE sounds like the document of someone trying to reconnect with why they started at all, testing textures and identities until something feels real again.
Some songs hold that honesty. GUNNA is almost a voice note, bent acoustic and a promise to himself: “I’ll make something happen.” It’s simple enough to believe. DOG stays restless, pacing emotional space, unsure where safety actually lives.
CAT is the sharpest moment on the record. No instruments, just the voice and the image of predator and prey. He watches the hunter with a mix of horror, fascination, and those small pinches of vindication that come from recognizing your own capacity to wound, stripped down enough that the writing, like death, has nowhere to hide. It’s uncomfortable in the right way, bare enough that the observation sticks.
TANK pulls the album outward into something more conceptual and oddly grounded at the same time. It plays like a thinly veiled tribute to the Utah Jazz rebuild, the future hanging somewhere between fantasy and miscalculation, failed hopes for Cooper Flagg drifting off to the Dallas Mavericks while names like Keyonte (George) and Isaiah (Collier) cycle through like pieces in a long game. The song leans into temporal sacrifice, the idea that you lose now so something better might exist later. “Pay for it somehow” repeats like a front office mantra, patience turning into faith, faith turning into exhaustion. It feels like lying on the floor staring at the ceiling and trying to believe the timeline still bends forward.
By the time the closer arrives, the record doesn’t need to convince you anymore. After all the distortion and circling, he finally speaks plainly. “All my parts / they show me love / even if it’s tough.” It’s not a grand revelation. It just sounds like someone deciding to stay.
BASE isn’t clean or consistent, but that’s part of the point. It’s a record about signal loss and recovery, about trying to locate yourself after success, after doubt, after the noise gets loud enough that you forget what you sounded like before it. Sometimes the production buries the message. Sometimes it frames it perfectly. Either way, you hear someone still reaching for a place to stand.
NBA COMP: THE 9TH SEED
Close enough to dream, far enough to put off how it usually ends. You might sneak into the playoffs and get crushed, or slide into the lottery and get crushed, slower. Either way, you keep watching because something real might still grow out of it.