Songwriter

Allen Ritter

New York, NY

Allen Ritter is a New York producer, keyboardist, and songwriter whose melodic contributions often function as the harmonic backbone of multi-writer Drake credits. He entered the OVO orbit in the mid-2010s and is best known for keyboard parts and chord changes that sit under sample flips authored by Boi-1da, Vinylz, or Frank Dukes. His name shows up on publishing splits across the If You're Reading This It's Too Late, Views, More Life, Scorpion, and Certified Lover Boy eras. Outside the Drake catalog his most defining co-write is Rihanna's "Needed Me" (2016), which became one of the era's most-streamed R&B records; he has also co-written for Beyoncé, Kanye West, Travis Scott, Jay-Z, and Future. His approach favors live keys, chord-based vamps, and atmospheric pads that give programmed drum tracks a more song-like architecture, and within the OVO production circle he often plays the role of the melodic foil to harder-hitting drum programmers. Like most modern Drake co-writers his credits sit inside multi-writer splits — his slice of the composition is the chord change or the pad bed rather than the whole song — but the cumulative footprint across more than fifteen Drake songs places him in the tier of writers without whom the late-2010s catalog would not sound the way it does.