Peace to Make Review: Ruth B. Turns a Breakup Into a Map (Oops)

Peace to Make isn’t “sad girl piano pop.” It’s Ruth B. obsessively rebuilding rooms from memory—until the details blur and she has to improvise.

A breakup album that refuses to be background music

This isn’t the kind of record you toss on while answering emails and pretend you “caught the vibe.” Peace to Make keeps poking you in the ribs: pay attention, this happened, this hurt, this is specific.

Ruth B. (Ruth Berhe) sings like she’s filing evidence. And the album’s real move—its whole quiet flex—is how it turns intimacy into setting. Not just feelings. Rooms. Seats. Times. The exact little scenes you replay until they start replaying you.

The origin story matters because the writing acts like a home language

Here’s what sits behind the music, whether she says it out loud or not: she comes from a household built on keeping culture intact.

Her parents emigrated from Ethiopia to Edmonton, Alberta in the mid-1980s—during the political instability under the Derg military junta and in the shadow of the 1984–85 Ethiopian famine, when many Ethiopians left for different parts of Canada. Edmonton’s Ethiopian community had already formed an association back in September 1982, and the early families built the precursors of a diaspora: Orthodox churches, cooperatives, mutual-aid associations, cultural events. Amharic at home. Continuity on purpose.

By 2016, there were about 5,200 people of Ethiopian descent in Edmonton (and about 44,000 across Canada). That’s not a fun trivia stat—it explains why her best lines act like they’re trying to preserve something before it disappears.

She’s talked about her parents being “pretty adamant on making sure that my brother and I retained the culture,” and that Ethiopian music was always playing in the house.

“Pretty adamant on making sure that my brother and I retained the culture.” — Ruth B.

And then, on her own, she found Ms. Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys—two artists who basically teach you that a diary can be a weapon if you sing it clearly enough. I can hear that lesson all over Peace to Make: she doesn’t “perform” the emotions; she documents them.

Arguable take: the album’s emotional power isn’t coming from vocal fireworks—it’s coming from how stubbornly she keeps the camera pointed at the same wound until you finally see its shape.

From piano lessons to six-second fame: the career was built in a blink

She took piano lessons at eight, started singing too, and later juggled a part-time job at a Reitmans clothing store while attending MacEwan University. The detail isn’t glamorous, which is the point: this wasn’t an industry-assembled origin. It sounds like a person who learned to work, then learned to write.

Then 2013 happened. She started posting six-second videos on Vine—at first lifestyle stuff, then short piano-and-vocal covers. You can practically feel how the platform shaped her instincts: short setups, clean hooks, emotional directness.

The breakout was “Lost Boy,” a piano-heavy ballad about Peter Pan and loneliness. She described it as feeling like a teenager’s diary entry set to a church chord progression. That description still fits her best work now—confessional, but harmonically comfort-food, like she’s trying to make the listener feel safe enough to hear something ugly.

That one song led to a Columbia Records signing, and “Lost Boy” eventually went 2× Platinum in the US. A six-second-app pipeline to a multi-platinum reality. Normal modern fairy tale, totally not strange at all.

Arguable take: that kind of instant scale is why she writes so much in second person—when your life changes overnight, you end up talking to ghosts because the present never sits still long enough.

Success relocated her, but the questions didn’t move with her

She’s admitted she felt overwhelmed being from Edmonton, Alberta—wondering how anyone would hear about her. And then: record deal, cross-country move to New York, then Los Angeles. The question got answered, but not in a way that necessarily calms you down.

Her 2017 debut studio album Safe Haven went on to rack up over 2.5 billion streams. And “Dandelions,” the lead single, got revived on TikTok years after its first viral moment—one of those modern-longevity miracles where a song comes back like it forgot something in your kitchen.

She left MacEwan at 20 and basically stepped inside a career that a six-second clip built for her.

Then five years passed.

I kept thinking that gap would show up as distance—like she’d come back sounding polished, maybe a little careful. On first impression, I actually expected Peace to Make to be smoother and more “adult” in the boring way. But on second listen, the record isn’t careful at all. It’s just controlled. Big difference.

Arguable take: five years didn’t “mature” her sound—it made her braver about leaving things unresolved.

The pandemic detour back to Edmonton: where the album starts to act human

During the pandemic, she returned to Edmonton and ended a relationship at 28. That timeline matters because the album behaves like someone stuck in the same emotional hallway, opening the same doors, checking the same rooms.

She’s said the lyrics were her trying to process what she was feeling and get through stuff. And the process is audible: she wrote the songs alone first, then sat with them long enough to figure out what they actually were. After three tracks, she went looking for a producer.

Instead of chasing the expected R&B-adjacent breakup-album lane, she linked up with Cole M.G.N.—a six-time Grammy-winning producer with credits in art-pop and indie corners (Beck, Christine and the Queens, Blood Orange, Julia Holter). That choice is the first real statement Peace to Make makes: she didn’t want the genre to do her emotional labor for her.

She pulled the title Peace to Make from a lyric, tying the record’s through-line to yearning—for answers, stability, peace. Not “closure.” Peace. Closure is an ending; peace is a way of surviving the middle.

Arguable take: bringing in an art-pop/indie-leaning producer is her way of refusing the usual breakup-album script, like she doesn’t trust a familiar sound to tell the truth.

The album’s secret weapon: second-person lyrics that won’t let go

The opening of “Didn’t I” hits like a confession that’s also an indictment: “I told you all my secrets, and I showed who I was / Told me you’ve been hurt, and I showed you how to trust.” That’s not just scene-setting—it’s a contract, and she’s pointing at the fine print you violated.

Across twelve songs, she keeps the narrative in her eyes, but the address stays locked in second person. “You” never gets to become “him” or “we” or “back then.” That’s a creative decision with teeth: she’s not reminiscing; she’s still talking to him like he’s in the next room.

It reminded me of how a household can be one language, one culture, one set of songs—kept alive through constant conversation with where you came from. This album does the same thing, except the “homeland” is a relationship that’s already left the room.

Arguable take: the second person isn’t a poetic flourish—it’s denial turned into grammar.

Where it cuts deepest: when she pins feelings to exact places

The writing hits hardest when it runs on specifics—like she’s carrying scenes the way other people carry prayers.

• “Not You”: She’s in the passenger seat of a kind man’s car and feels physically sick because he’s good for her. Over piano, she lands the knife: “Cause he’s everything that’s good for me, it’s true / But he’s not you.” That’s not romance—that’s addiction with manners.
• “Shoulda Been Us”: She puts a sign at the bar she liked and spirals into the brutal adult thought: what would it be like to have children with other people? The line doesn’t need melodrama; the premise is already cruel.
• “Best Days”: She remembers lying on the grass together, hearing something scary, running down laughing. Acoustic guitar and midtempo drums carry the panic underneath the nostalgia: “I’m so scared that I won’t laugh like that / Won’t kiss like that, won’t trust like that again.” That’s the fear people don’t admit—the fear that your future will be emotionally smaller.
• “Bad Combination”: Suddenly the tempo jumps in a hotel-room kind of way—“What’s your name, what’s your sign, wanna be mine?”—and later the refrain gets jittery: “No telling what I’ll do, do / No telling what I’ll do.” That’s not carefree; that’s someone testing whether recklessness can pass as freedom.

Each of these songs carries the room it happened in. You can almost smell the air conditioning in the hotel, feel the passenger-seat nausea, hear the bar’s clink.

Arguable take: the “small” moments are the real plot; the breakup is just the weather.

Where it slips a bit: when the rooms evaporate

It’s not an accident that “No Boundaries” lets the room go. It’s a promise of unconditional love that could be pulled from any songwriter’s notepad in any city. And “Pick Me” does something similar: it reaches for self-empowerment, and it has a striking image—this broken heart “is a perfect mosaic / Of all the moments that I wanted to erase.” Great line.

But then the hook swings brighter than the verses have earned, like the song is trying to pep-talk itself into sunlight. That’s my mild gripe with this album: when she stops naming the room, the emotions get generic fast. The specificity is the engine; without it, she’s just… good. And “good” isn’t why you come to this record.

Arguable take: the album’s universal moments are actually the weakest ones, because her gift isn’t relatability—it’s precision.

“Breathe,” writer’s block, and the weird power of feeling small

She’s described hitting writer’s block while composing “Breathe,” then going back to Edmonton for six months. After that, she drove to Banff and remembered feeling “so small” for the first time in a long time—liberating, not scary.

I don’t know if every listener will clock that shift, but I can hear it in the pacing: the album has stretches where it stops chasing answers and starts accepting scale. Not “I’m fine,” more like “I’m not the center of this pain, and thank God.”

From beginning to finish, the process took about a year, and the flow returned when she went back to the place her family landed thirty years earlier—the city they chose after leaving Ethiopia.

And she keeps returning there, emotionally and literally. Edmonton is where the roots are. And roots are what her writing grabs when it stalls.

There’s also a blunt truth baked into the five-year gap between albums: it doesn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t writing—it means she needed to live. Needed real rooms before she could write real rooms. The bar night. The late-night phone call. The passenger seat. The grass they ran through laughing.

Arguable take: the album isn’t delayed by perfectionism—it’s delayed by the requirement that the lyrics be earned.

So what is Peace to Make actually doing?

It’s staging a conversation with someone who isn’t there and refusing to let the silence “win” by turning it into a clean break. It’s more honest than closure, and also more annoying in the way real grief is annoying—because it keeps showing up even when you’ve got plans.

I’ll admit, I’m not totally sure the tracklist always knows when to stop circling the same thought. There were moments I kept waiting for a musical left turn that never came. But the consistency starts to feel intentional: she’s not trying to entertain you out of her pain. She’s trying to tell the truth from inside it.

If I had to put it plainly: Peace to Make is Ruth B. choosing memory over mythology.

Arguable take: the album’s “still talking to you” energy is either courageous or self-sabotaging, and it depends on the day you hear it.

Where I land (and what I’m playing again)

I walk away thinking this is solid work—emotionally sharp when it’s concrete, a little interchangeable when it floats up into slogans.

The songs I’m actually going back to:

• “Jealous”
• “Not You”
• “Who’s Gonna Love You” (that 2 a.m. refusal hits like a door finally locking)

And yeah, I thought “Jealous” would be petty on first glance. It isn’t. The jealousy is about giving love away and not getting it back, which is a much uglier flavor—because it makes you feel foolish, not just angry.

Arguable take: her best songs don’t “heal” you—they make you admit you’re still bargaining.

Peace to Make doesn’t hand you closure. It hands you a set of keys and makes you walk back through the rooms yourself. That’s the whole trick—and when it works, it’s uncomfortably effective.

Our verdict: People who like breakup albums that read like location-tagged journal entries will love Peace to Make. If you need big sonic risks, flashy reinvention, or choruses that kick the door off its hinges, you’ll get impatient and start checking your phone by track six.

FAQ

• What is the core theme of Peace to Make?
  Yearning for answers, stability, and peace—less “moving on,” more “learning to live inside the question.”
• Is Peace to Make mainly piano-driven?
  Piano is a backbone, but the album’s real driver is how Ruth B. builds songs around specific scenes—cars, bars, late-night calls, hotel rooms.
• What’s the impact of using second-person lyrics across the album?
  It keeps the ex “in the room” the whole time, which makes the emotions feel immediate rather than nostalgic.
• Which tracks hit hardest emotionally?
  “Not You,” “Best Days,” and “Who’s Gonna Love You” feel the most physically real—like they happened in places you can picture.
• Are there any weaker moments?
  When songs like “No Boundaries” and parts of “Pick Me” drift into universal phrasing, they lose the sharp, room-specific punch that makes the album sting.

If you want that feeling of living inside an album’s “rooms” a little longer, a favorite album-cover poster can be a nice, quiet souvenir. You can browse ours here: https://www.architeg-prints.com