The year is 2015, and everyone wears combat boots, abides by quirky Pinterest quotes, and posts on the biggest short-form video app, Vine. For over a year, 19-year-old Ruth Berhe (B for short) from Edmonton—the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta—had been uploading covers of herself singing and playing keyboard from her childhood bedroom. Then inspiration struck in the form of a Once Upon a Time episode, and Berhe published a six-second clip of herself playing four very satisfying chords while singing: “I am a lost boy from Neverland, usually hanging out with Peter Pan.” Suddenly people were demanding a full song, which she released in full on YouTube. “Lost Boy” became a multi-platinum hit, garnering nearly 200 million views on YouTube, peaking at No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, and earning Berhe a record deal.

In a rare feat, Ruth B. joined the ranks of Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Halsey, and Alessia Cara as a musician discovered via social media in the 2010s. “The internet is such a great tool to share your music… you never know who’s gonna hear you,” Berhe says. The singer views her relationship with her fans as a collaborative one. Fresh off earning a deal with Columbia Records, she kept posting on Vine as fans prompted her to keep expanding her catalog. Eventually, Ruth B. debuted her first studio album, Safe Haven, which she credits to her hometown of Edmonton and to her parents, with whom she lived until her late twenties.

Despite the massive success of “Lost Boy,” Safe Haven didn’t make much noise when it was originally released in 2017. But the album includes one of the first songs Berhe ever wrote, “Dandelions,” a whimsical love song that made a huge resurgence at the start of the pandemic in the most unlikely of places: Indonesia. New to TikTok in 2020, the singer was scrolling the app when she noticed “Dandelions” being used by someone on the other side of the world. In early 2021, the song made its way to North America, where it gained traction after fans independently created a slowed-and-reverbed version. Berhe embraced the trend, officially releasing the remix that summer.

By 2022, “Dandelions” had become a global viral sensation, used in over 2.6 million TikTok videos and accumulating more than 2 billion streams on Spotify alone. Its romantic, dream-like melody and lyrics have made it a go-to for first dances. Berhe even re-recorded a special piano version of “Dandelions” for her best friend’s wedding—a moment that left the singer emotional as she watched the couple share their first dance to her own song.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2026: Berhe now lives in Los Angeles, where she has built her highly anticipated third album, Peace To Make, due out worldwide on Friday, August 21. The album grew out of a period of transition in the singer’s life. Having just come out of a long relationship, Berhe leaned on her love of songwriting to work through her emotions. “I knew this had to be me genuinely processing this relationship being over and this new life I was living in,” she says.

Once she had drafts of “Best Days” and “Bad Combination,” Berhe brought the songs to Cole M.G.N. (Cole Marsden Greif-Neill), who serves as the main producer on Peace To Make, and the two knew they could make an album together. They started from the ground up: M.G.N. would experiment with melodies while Berhe felt out the music and wrote about the many emotions surfacing at specific moments of her growth. “A big part of why I’ve healed and moved on from those emotions was because of this album and being able to write it, so that makes it much more special to me.” Needless to say, Ruth B.’s third record was truly her “peace to make.”

Working with a single producer let Berhe get out of her head. She recalls the day she worked on “Breathe” in the studio, where M.G.N. encouraged her to start singing rather than writing while he played along. At first she mumbled a lot of “la, la, la’s,” but the moment M.G.N. played what she calls “the most beautiful guitar I’d ever heard in my life,” the hook clicked into place, and the two shared a jolt of collaborative excitement.

In more ways than one, “Breathe” is the track that became the catharsis of Berhe’s healing. The song took a year to finish, she reveals, because she hit a wall and went home to Edmonton for six months to process her trajectory as an artist. “Genuinely from the beginning of ‘Lost Boy,’ my life took off so quick that I never had a minute to sit [with everything].” After a few months of therapy, Berhe decided to take a solo trip to Banff, the mountain town she used to visit growing up. Connecting with nature, she reconnected with herself—and finally found the space to finish “Breathe.” The closing lyrics go, “The mountains are so big, I feel so small. The oceans are so great, they could drown me if they want.” In that moment, Berhe found comfort in realizing “nothing is really that big.”

One spine-tingling song that deserves to be a hit on Peace To Make is “Didn’t I,” written while Berhe was hanging out with friends in the music industry. She tells me she doesn’t normally break into song around friends—but, as she puts it, “when there’s some wine involved, you’re just fearless.” In a friend’s studio, she found her inspiration as someone played around with instrumentals, and she asked for a mic. She started by singing the phrase “Didn’t I” over and over in a wine-loosened haze, then finished the whole song in about 45 minutes—a whirlwind she “didn’t think anything of” at the time. The next morning, she casually sent the draft to her manager, who told her to pass it along to the label. Another Ruth B. banger was born.

It’s been nearly four years since Berhe last performed live for her own fans. Over the past few months, she’s been reconnecting with them through social media. For starters, she wiped her entire Instagram feed, rebranding to launch the official Peace To Make era. She’s also been posting more consistently on TikTok, dropping singles like “Bad Combination” and “Didn’t I” and teasing snippets of new material. Berhe hopes fans feel understood by this album and treat it as “a safe place to go when you’re hurting or healing.” In the past, she would linger after her shows to talk with fans about how her music had changed their lives for the better. She’s looking forward to more of those enlightening, cathartic conversations—especially hearing about listeners’ own introspective journeys with the new album.

The closing track on Peace To Make is “Pick Me,” a title that flips its usual meaning: it’s about ending a relationship and realizing the best thing you can do is choose yourself. In a relationship, Berhe says, she tends to be an empath, someone who struggles to see the bad in people. But “Pick Me” captures the season she’s in now: “knowing my worth, knowing what I deserve, and not settling for anything less than that.”

Listen to Peace To Make, out now.