The eclectic Somerville alt-indie project releases a psychedelic new visual for ‘Maybe It’s Time’ on Tuesday, August 19
Melissa Nilles’ inaugural Dream A Better World Festival set for Sunday, August 24 at Warehouse XI in Somerville with Evan Greer, Why Try, and others
Listen to May EP ‘Ripple Effect’ x Festival tickets
SOMERVILLE, Mass. [August 19, 2025] – When Melissa Lee Nilles and Cedric Lamour first conceived the metaphorical idea of a new project after the dissolution of their prior band, the name that would come to define the new venture came to them through the screen. The musicians were playing a battle royale magic-based video game called Spellbreak, and quickly found refuge in a land of ancient castles, big red trees, and treasure chests. This “safe zone,” a place to collect themselves and take in the beauty around them before heading back out to battle, was dubbed Ruby Grove.
The name would immediately take hold for the band, and act as a multi-layed foundation for the Somerville-based project, where a sonic cocktail of indie alternative with rock, pop, trip-hop, and neo-soul grooves would provide a soundtrack to help its members and audience heal past traumas and combat burnout from an increasingly stressful and antagonistic society.
The notion of a safe space comes quickly into view this month with two elements that are intrinsically intertwined: A new psychedelic, vaporwave-infused music video for the track “Maybe It’s Time,” first included on the quartet’s debut May EP Ripple Effect, set for release on Tuesday, August 19; and the launch of the inaugural Dream A Better World Fest, a multi-faceted all-day, all-inclusive celebration of ideas, empowerment, and voices at Warehouse XI in Somerville on Sunday, August 24.
Both the video and festival are the brainchild of Nilles, an expressive arts therapist and mental health counselor who crafted the visual as a healing mechanism to confront past trauma, and organized the festival to provide a stage for musicians, visual artists, and activists to respond to the times we’re living in with speeches, advocacy, inspiration, and live music.
“Practicing meditation and mindfulness since the pandemic woke me up to some of the prison I had been living in mentally,” Nilles says. “I’ve spent long enough healing from childhood trauma – I’m not going to let Trump or the lingering effects of the pandemic keep me down too, especially when I’ve finally made this kind of internal progress. The whole Ripple Effect EP is an exploration of this journey, from exploring mindfulness and meditation to increase joy to releasing barriers of shame, realizing you’re part of a greater whole which takes away a lot of anxiety about belonging, etc. The EP touches upon the darkness – desperation and demoralization stemming from the pandemic, shame patterns, fear, trauma, etc. – in order to bring the light to the listener.”
The light now extends to the stage as well, from Ruby Grove’s busy slate of shows to the launch of this new festival.
Dream A Better World Fest is headlined by trans artist and activist Evan Greer and features performances by a host of outspoken homegrown bands and artists: Americana act Lonely Leesa and the Lost Cowboys, indie quintet Why Try, Linnea Herzog of glam-punk band Linnea’s Garden, Songs of Liberation (For Palestine), and singer-songwriter Chris Walton. Also taking part are local organizations and causes, including Fight For The Future, Mass Peace Action, Willie For Somerville, Art Stays Here, poet Victor Infante, artist Meredith Blankenship, and Somerville For Palestine.
“The whole focus of the event is around sharing actionable ideas to create a better future, sharing personal experiences and perspectives, and helping people move out of frozen or despair places into inspiration and action places,” Nilles says. “Dream A Better World Fest is centered around the idea that we need to respond to the current times not just as a knee-jerk reaction to Trump but by actually brainstorming and sharing ideas and visualizing how we could create a better world.”
That includes supporting immigrants through their transition to the US; defending climate change; protecting LGBTQ+, POC, and minority communities; increasing mental wellness, and an individual sense of purpose, taxing the rich and decreasing poverty, revamping our healthcare system, and other causes that are front-and-center in life in 2026.
It’s appropriate, then, that the festival arrives a few short days after the launch of the “Maybe It’s Time” music video, bringing a visual to a song thematically centering around mindfulness, breaking old patterns, and opening up to possibility and what life has to offer.
It’s a fitting snapshot of the band’s creative lens both visually and musically, as Nilles (vocals and keyboards) and Lamour (bass) are rounded out in Ruby Grove by guitarist Sergio Romero and drummer and percussionist Reed Farhat, who has since replaced Sage Gibbons, who appears on the EP recording.
“‘Maybe It’s Time’ is all about getting out of your own way, breaking internal patterns of defeatism and doubt, not holding yourself back creatively, and getting in touch with the sense of possibility in every moment,” Nilles says. “It’s also a bit of a grateful ode to meditation, specifically insight meditation, which has benefited me greatly in every part of my life, including being the best catalyst for healing long-lingering patterns from past depression and anxiety and ongoing C-PTSD from which I am a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault.”
Nilles credits the creation of the song for getting back into writing and creativity after the dissolution of her former band, Miele, of which Lamour was also a member, and the general deadness and malaise of the pandemic era. What developed, first as a 2023 single and then as a remastered version fit for this past spring’s debut EP, was a track that would embody the openness and free-spirited nature of Ruby Grove.
“‘Maybe It’s Time’ also represents the crossover between hip-hop, trip-hop, electronica, indie rock, and soul that we were exploring at the time of the creation of the band,” Nilles adds. “That track is largely inspired by hip-hop/rock fusion groups like Gorillaz, lofi hip-hop artists like ALEX and Mikel, middle eastern traditional musicians like Fairouz, soul artists like Stevie Wonder, and cross-genre funk/jazz-fusion artists like Jamiroquai.”
“Maybe It’s Time” was recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered by Nicolas Zampiello at New Alliance Audio in Somerville, with Zampiello supplying the digital drums and remastering the older single for the EP version, syncing it up with the rest of the record and modernizing it to flow with the other tracks, which were recorded well after. The remaining songs on Ripple Effect were recorded, mixed, and mastered by Ethan Dussault at New Alliance Audio.
The forthcoming video, created and edited by Nilles, who also handled the digital curation, production, editing, and shooting, with clips of Ruby Grove live at The Jungle shot by videographer Jeff Wang, takes its eclectic sound and offers up a kaleidoscopic visual. In it, a colorful backdrop unfolds as a sort of surreal, Jungian dream in which all of the female characters in the video, including Nilles, are also reflections of the main character, a dreamer we are introduced to at the outset, who is seeking peace, connection, and insight, but is also fighting demons and doubts.
“My goal was to create a psychedelic and psychological video representing a self-empowerment and discovery journey inspired by retro imagery and vaporwave videos like Saint Pepsi’s visual remixes of old commercials,” Nilles adds. “At the time of the making of the song, I had been listening to a lot of lofi hip-hop, trip-hop, and synthwave and vaporwave on YouTube and so I felt like adopting some of the characteristic trippiness of the retro vaporwave aesthetic was right for this song.”
The video can also be viewed through a feminist lens in breaking patterns and cycles of generational trauma for women and seeking to empower women to pursue their passions rather than defaulting to tradition or obligation. Nilles noted it was difficult and became an important personal challenge to find footage on the Prelinger Archive of any 1940s/1950s women subverting the stereotypical housewife role, and it was eye-opening to directly witness the amount of misogyny present in film in the 1940s and 1950s, where one’s options as an actress presented a “Madonna/whore complex”.
“I always had a retro and psychedelic vision for this track,” Nilles notes, “though I wasn’t exactly sure how to bring it to life until I spent more time with more retro footage from the Prelinger archive, and I’m so glad to finally bring it to life in this way with our new video!”
With upcoming live shows, in addition to the festival appearance, at Tres Gatos in Jamaica Plain on August 16; September 16 at Somerville Mayoral Candidate Willie Burnley Jr.’s preliminary party; October 25 as “Red Zeppelin” at The Loft’s Halloween show; and November 1 with Jinxland back at Warehouse XI, and an aggressive live schedule so far in 2025 that has taken Ruby Grove to stages in Connecticut and New Jersey, Nilles and the boys are bringing their message of hope and activism to the people.
And from there, what the listener does with the music and message is up to them.
“Our motto for Ruby Grove is about creating a safe place to land,” the band offers. “We hope that people find relaxation, hope, enjoyment, and a sense of a mirror of their own complex psychological journeys as they level up and work on their relationship with themselves in the Ripple Effect EP. With the ‘Maybe It’s Time’ music video itself, we hope that people can enjoy it on a surface level but that some might stay to rewatch a few times, understand the relationship between the lyrics, the female characters in the video, and their journey, see themselves or their own experience reflected in it, and take a look at the psychological and feminist themes emerging from the video itself around seeking and literally dreaming and creating self-empowerment and building new mental pathways.”
One of those paths leads to Dream A Better World Fest, and Nilles is personally inviting everyone to come along for the ride.
Media Contact: Direct press inquiries to Michael Marotta at michael@knyvet.com and reach Melissa Nilles of Ruby Grove and Dream A Better World at rubygroveband@gmail.com.
