Ronnie Radke

Ronnie Radke — vocalist, lyricist and founder of Falling in Reverse — built two significant American heavy rock bands and lost the first of them to his own biography. He founded Escape the Fate in Las Vegas as a teenager and sang on the debut record in 2006. In the same period he was involved in a fight in which a young man was shot and killed — Radke did not fire the shots, but he was convicted of battery and later imprisoned between 2008 and 2010 for violating probation. He was expelled from the band he had created. He put Falling in Reverse together while still in prison, writing the material he would record after his release. The Drug in Me Is You (2011) came out a few months after he got out and entered the American charts — an improbable return for someone who had lost everything. His work since is defined by a refusal of genre: Falling in Reverse combines metalcore, rap, electronic pop and ballad in tracks that change register without warning, a choice that earned him both a mass audience and persistent critical contempt. Radke writes openly about his own path — prison, addiction, public disputes — and turned the exposure of his contradictions into the repertoire's central material, which is rare in a genre that tends to prefer persona to confession.