Ross Ryan created Dead on a Sunday because he had always wanted to sing in a rock band. But he didn’t realize that his voice sounds a lot like that of Bob Belcher, the lead character on the popular cartoon show Bob’s Burgers. The people who caught a Dead on a Sunday TikTok noticed, though, and Ryan’s music went viral, with even the supervising director of Bob’s Burgers eventually weighing in.
“I started messing around with the TikTok thing, like, summer 2021. And you know, TikTok either goes fast or it goes slow. So it was going really slow, and I kind of backed off it a bit, mostly out of frustration,” Ryan recalls. “And then this last summer, I decided to kind of go hard at it again, because you know, it’s the number-one entertainment app, and it’s the only place that’s really breaking artists.”
He began making videos in which he re-created a popular song in the dark-wave genre, which is also the styling of his band. In one, he combined Mr. Kitty’s viral tune “After Dark” with the lyrics from Blink-182’s “Dammit,” and then uploaded the band’s performance to TikTok in October. It “was growing slowly on Spotify, maybe 100 plays a day,” he says. “Then this guy on TikTok comments on the video and says, ‘It sounds like Bob Belcher.’ I was like, ‘Is that supposed to be a good thing?’ I wasn’t mad; it was funny. I didn’t have a video to post that day, so I just took a lot of clips of us playing our last show and I tagged that comment and wrote ‘Bob-core’ over the video. And within just, like, seven seconds…it had hundreds of views. I went about my day, and when I went on TikTok later, it was at 3,000 views, and every time I refreshed, people were commenting. … I’ve never had anything that translated into fans and streams of the music just overnight.”
The video now has more than 745,000 views, and a follow-up video of Ryan dressed as Bob Belcher lip-syncing the viral audio has racked up more than 100,000. As a result, Dead on a Sunday’s debut album, Strange Days, which was also released in October, has been gaining more listens and saves day after day.
Meanwhile, the song that went viral, which Ryan titled “Dammit (After Dark),” has more than 135,000 plays on Spotify. “Every listener comes back on average about five times a day and listens,” Ryan says. “It’s boosted and grown the fan base. All my accounts on all platforms have grown.” – Westword
