‘I Wanted to Start Off Scorching’: Ryan Beatty on His Exhilarating New Video for “Secret Language”

Reported by Vogue.

Ryan Beatty has spent years making music about the wreckage love leaves behind. His fourth album, Sweet Fortune, out June 26, is something else entirely — and the lead single "Secret Language" announces that shift with both arms wide open. According to Vogue, the song captures the specific vertigo of standing at the edge of falling for someone, before you have the language to say it out loud: "I love you, I say it in a secret language / Did you hear what my words couldn't tell?" Horns swell. The chorus goes enormous. For a song about what can't be spoken, it is anything but quiet.

The accompanying video — directed by Rhys Scarabosio and shot with a skeletal crew across nearly a week of cross-country driving and flying — traces Beatty from Hollywood Boulevard to Las Vegas, New Mexico, the Texas plains, Nashville, Louisiana, and finally Manhattan and Boston, where he collapses onto a bench to catch his breath. He ran the whole thing in cowboy boots. "My shins certainly paid for it," he admits. The lo-fi spontaneity was entirely the point: "Nothing felt put on," he says. "It was freeing. And I think that shows."

Confidence Earned

Beatty's career has covered real distance to get here. He broke through as a teenager posting YouTube covers, walked away from a label at 18 that wanted to mold him into the next Justin Bieber, and built a critically respected catalog across three albums — from the alt-R&B intimacy of Boy in Jeans to the folk-and-strings devastation of 2023's Calico. Along the way, collaborations with Brockhampton and Tyler, the Creator built his credibility in left-field circles. Then Beyoncé called. Beatty co-wrote four tracks on Cowboy Carter — including "Protector" and "Bodyguard," on which he also sang — and walked away with a Grammy for Album of the Year. "That experience gave me more confidence that what I do is great," he says, choosing his words carefully.

Sweet Fortune was written from a place he hadn't worked from before: happiness. He finished "Secret Language" in his boyfriend's Boston apartment while the laundry ran and the chords finally locked in. "Approaching music from a place of joy and being in love was a new thing for me," he says. The album runs maximalist where Calico ran spare — bigger instrumentation, less wreckage. Beatty collaborated on the track with longtime partner Ethan Gruska, and the result is intentionally cinematic, intentionally celebratory. "I wanted to start off scorching," he says of the decision to lead with it.

What reads clearly, across the song and the video and the conversation, is that Beatty is no longer making art from a crouch — and Sweet Fortune will be worth every mile.

Read the original at Vogue.