The Universal Studios Hollywood soundstage pulses with the kind of electric tension that only live television can conjure—a cocktail of nerves, spotlights, and the faint hum of a crowd holding its collective breath. It’s Monday night, November 10, 2025, and The Voice Season 28’s Knockouts are in full swing, the third installment of a round where dreams teeter on the edge of a single performance. The coaches—Michael Bublé with his velvet charisma, Niall Horan channeling boy-band cool, Snoop Dogg’s laid-back wisdom, and Reba McEntire’s unyielding country fire—lean forward in their iconic red chairs, eyes sharp as they await the next duel. Mega Mentor Joe Walsh, the Eagles legend with a voice like aged whiskey, has already dispensed his gold: tone it down, let the emotion simmer, don’t let the roar drown the whisper. But no one, not even the production crew whispering in headsets, could have predicted the seismic shift about to crack the stage wide open.
Enter Ryan Mitchell, 25, the lanky alt-rock troubadour from the sun-bleached sprawl of Los Angeles. With his tousled dark hair, a faded Cage the Elephant tee peeking from under a thrift-store blazer, and eyes that carry the weight of a thousand unsung demos, Ryan steps into the ring for his Knockout against Conrad Khalil, a smooth R&B crooner from Atlanta. Just months ago, Ryan was the invisible man—the guy who poured his soul into a haunting cover of “Cigarette Daydreams” during Blind Auditions, only to watch all four chairs stay stubbornly still. The rejection stung like salt in a fresh wound, a public echo of the rejections that had already defined his young career: endless open mics at The Viper Room, TikTok virals that fizzled into silence, and a four-year battle with sobriety that left him couch-surfing Hollywood Boulevard. But this? This was supposed to be his second chance, courtesy of host Carson Daly’s groundbreaking “Callback Card”—a one-time power play that yanked Ryan back from the brink, rewriting the rules of the show in a heartbeat of mercy. Tonight, armed with The Cranberries’ “Zombie,” Ryan isn’t just auditioning. He’s igniting.
The opening chords slither through the speakers like a gathering storm— that unmistakable riff, raw and unrelenting, born from the ’90s Irish rock ether. Ryan closes his eyes for a split second, fingers ghosting the mic stand as if it’s an old lover. Then he unleashes. His voice doesn’t just enter the room; it invades it. Low and gravelly at first, a whisper of pain that builds like thunder rolling over the Hollywood Hills. “Another head hangs lowly, child is slowly taken…” The lyrics, a gut-punch protest against violence and loss, twist in his throat, infused with a personal venom that only someone who’s stared down their own demons can muster. Ryan’s not mimicking Dolores O’Riordan’s ethereal wail; he’s reimagining it, layering in alt-pop edges—subtle electronic hums from his pre-recorded track, a falsetto bridge that soars into the rafters like a cry for absolution. His body sways, not with showy flair, but with the quiet fury of a man who’s clawed his way out of rock bottom. Sweat beads on his forehead under the lights, his free hand clenching into a fist as he hits the chorus: “In your head, in your head, zombie, zombie…” The final “It’s the same old theme since nineteen-sixteen” lands like a verdict, his voice cracking just enough to bare the soul beneath.
The stage falls silent. For a beat that stretches into eternity, you could hear a pin drop—or perhaps the collective gasp of 300 audience members, their phones forgotten in laps, jaws slack. Conrad’s performance of Ne-Yo’s “Closer” had been slick, a crowd-pleaser that got toes tapping and heads nodding, his vocal runs dancing like fireflies in the night. Solid. Safe. But Ryan? Ryan was the aftershock. The whisper that became a roar.
Reba McEntire is the first to break. The Queen of Country rises slowly from her chair, her trademark red curls catching the light like a halo, but it’s her eyes—wide, glistening—that betray the depth of the moment. She crosses the stage in three strides, pulling Ryan into a hug that feels more like a lifeline than a formality. “Boy,” she says, her Oklahoma twang thick with emotion, pulling back to cup his face in her hands, “that’s what every coach dreams of—watching someone rise like that. You didn’t just sing ‘Zombie’; you became it. The pain, the power… it’s in your bones.” Her voice shakes, a rare crack in the armor of a woman who’s seen every octave of heartbreak in her six-decade career. The crowd erupts then, a tidal wave of cheers crashing over the stage, but Reba holds Ryan’s gaze a second longer, whispering something too low for the mics to catch—something about phoenixes and never looking back.
Across the panel, Michael Bublé leans into his mic, his perpetual grin replaced by a look of stunned reverence. “Ryan, from that first audition where we all missed you—myself included—to this? You’ve exceeded every expectation. Your tone is gorgeous, your interpretation… it’s like you cracked open the song’s heart and let it bleed.” Niall Horan, the former One Direction heartthrob turned two-time Voice champion, nods vigorously, his Irish lilt cutting through the applause. “Mate, the growth I’ve seen in you is unreal. You took a ’90s anthem and made it feel like it was written yesterday—for you.” Even Snoop Dogg, the eternal cool cat, drops his trademark chill for a moment of raw honesty: “That was five-star, straight up. You felt it in your soul, and we felt it in ours.” And Carson Daly, ever the steady anchor, steps forward with a smile that splits his face like dawn breaking. “Ryan’s journey? The callback no one saw coming. From zero chairs to this—it’s the stuff legends are made of.”
But to understand the roar, you have to trace it back to the whisper—the fragile, flickering spark that almost went out before it ever caught fire. Ryan Mitchell wasn’t born with a silver mic in his hand. Raised in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the Hollywood sign looms like a taunt on the horizon, he grew up in a modest bungalow filled with the ghosts of his parents’ unfulfilled dreams. His dad, a session guitarist who scraped by on jingle gigs, taught him three chords on a pawn-shop Fender at age eight. His mom, a former backup singer for a Motown cover band, hummed Motown melodies while flipping burgers at In-N-Out. Music wasn’t a luxury in the Mitchell house; it was survival, a threadbare blanket against the chill of rent hikes and rejection letters from Juilliard.
By 18, Ryan was gigging in dive bars, his voice—a husky blend of Eddie Vedder’s grit and Hozier’s haunt—drawing nods from barflies but not bookers. He scraped together enough for a home studio in his garage, dropping alt-pop tracks like “Russian Roulette” and “Ruin My Life” on Spotify, where they garnered 50,000 streams and a whisper of buzz in indie circles. TikTok became his unlikely confessional, raw covers of My Chemical Romance and Post Malone racking up millions of views, but the algorithm’s favor is fickle. A viral clip of him busking on Venice Beach led to a manager, a cramped office in Silver Lake, and whispers of label interest. Then came the fall.
At 21, the pressure cracked him open. The bottle became his muse—vodka handles downed in dimly lit rooms, lyrics scrawled on napkins stained with regret. He fell in with a crowd of aspiring starlets and sound engineers, nights blurring into hazes of parties in the Hills where cocaine lines snaked like accusations. By 22, he was homeless, crashing on friends’ couches, his guitar his only constant. “I was writing songs about drowning, but I was the one pulling myself under,” Ryan confessed in a pre-taped segment aired just before his Knockout, his voice steady now but laced with the echo of old shadows. Rehab at 21 was a revelation—four years sober, a sponsor who doubled as a songwriting partner, and a renewed fire that turned his demos into declarations. Tracks like “Lose Your Mind,” a dystopian banger about LA’s glittering despair, caught the ear of New Noise Magazine, who hailed him as “the alt-pop voice of broken dreams.” But the big break? It eluded him, a carrot dangling just out of reach.
Enter The Voice. Ryan applied on a whim, after a late-night scroll through casting calls. The Blind Audition on September 22 was meant to be his shot—the kind of high-stakes gamble that could catapult him from garage jams to Grammys. He chose “Cigarette Daydreams,” a brooding Cage the Elephant track that mirrored his sobriety journey: the ache of growing up too fast, the haze of what-ifs. He poured everything into it— the vulnerability in the verses, the build to a falsetto that cracked like thunder. The stage lights burned hot, the coaches’ backs a wall of judgment. But the chairs stayed put. Reba winced. Niall shifted. Snoop nodded appreciatively, but no one turned. The silence was deafening, a public flaying that left Ryan backstage in tears, his dad wrapping him in a bear hug. “It’s not over,” his father murmured. But in that moment, it felt like the end.
Carson Daly saw what the coaches missed. The host, with 28 seasons under his belt, had watched too many talents slip away—the raw diamonds overlooked in the rush for polish. NBC’s new “Callback Card,” a one-of-a-kind twist allowing Carson to resurrect one no-turn artist for a do-over, was tailor-made for Ryan. Twenty-four hours later, Ryan was back, this time with Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time,” a bold pivot that flipped the pop princess’s plea into a raw, gender-bent anthem of desperation. The chairs spun like roulette—Reba first, then Niall, Snoop, and Bublé in a frenzy. Ryan chose Team Reba, drawn to her no-nonsense grit and the way she saw the fighter in him. “You’re not just a voice,” she told him backstage. “You’re a story waiting to be sung.”
The Battles were a proving ground. Paired against a powerhouse belter named Aubrey Nicole on a mashup of “Somebody to Love” by Queen and Jefferson Airplane, Ryan held his own, his rock edge cutting through her soulful runs. Reba saved him, advancing him to the Knockouts with a nod that said, I see you. Whispers started then—fan forums buzzing with “underdog alert,” TikTok edits splicing his audition fails with triumphant rehearsals. But it was the Knockout that turned the tide.
Backstage, post-performance, the air crackles with a different energy. Ryan, drenched in sweat and adrenaline, collapses into a chair, his hands trembling as Reba declares him the winner. Conrad, gracious in defeat, pulls him into a bro-hug, whispering, “You earned that, man.” The other coaches swarm the stage for the ritual feedback huddle, but it’s clear: Ryan’s not just advancing to the Playoffs. He’s rewriting the narrative. Carson, mic in hand, turns to the camera with that trademark Daly grin. “From zero to hero—Ryan Mitchell, the callback no one saw coming.” The audience chants his name, a roar that echoes off the soundstage walls, spilling into the control room where producers high-five and editors scramble for the highlight reel.
Social media ignites like dry tinder. Within minutes, #RyanZombie trends worldwide, clips of the performance amassing 5 million views by midnight. Fans dissect every nuance: the way his voice dipped into a near-growl on “violence causes,” the subtle tear tracking down his cheek during the bridge. “This is what The Voice is for,” one X user posts, a clip racking up 200,000 likes. “Not the flash— the fire.” Reddit threads explode with theories: Will Reba’s Mic Drop go to Ryan for the Rose Parade slot? Is he the season’s dark horse, poised to unseat frontrunners like Team Snoop’s Yoshihanaa or Niall’s DEK of Hearts? Music blogs like American Songwriter hail it as “the redemption arc we didn’t know we needed,” while Rolling Stone drops a teaser: “Ryan Mitchell: From Homeless to Heartbreaker?”
For Ryan, the roar is bittersweet. In a quiet moment after the show, as confetti settles and the crew strikes the set, he sits with his parents in the green room, the Callback Card clutched like a talisman. “I almost walked away,” he admits, voice low, the adrenaline ebbing into exhaustion. “After the first audition, I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this.'” His mom, tears carving paths through her makeup, squeezes his hand. “You were always unstoppable, baby. You just needed the stage to catch up.” Reba joins them then, sliding into the booth with a plate of post-show tacos. “Kid, that wasn’t a performance. That was a proclamation. You’re 25 and unstoppable—own it.” They laugh, the sound raw and real, a family forged in the fire of almosts.
As the Playoffs loom on December 1, Ryan’s trajectory feels inevitable, yet thrillingly uncertain. Reba’s team—now a powerhouse of Aaron Nichols’s twangy ballads, Cori Kennedy’s bluesy fire, and Ryan’s rock renegade—heads into the fray with momentum. Whispers in Nashville say he’s got the fanbase to carry him far: 86,000 monthly Spotify listeners spiking to 200,000 overnight, his back catalog surging on iTunes. Labels circle—Interscope sniffing around his demos, Atlantic floating a development deal. But Ryan, ever the whisperer at heart, tempers the hype. “This isn’t about the win,” he tells me over a late-night Zoom from his Echo Park apartment, guitar in lap. “It’s about proving to that kid on the couch, bottle in hand, that the roar starts small. One note at a time.”
In a season stacked with prodigies and polished pros, Ryan Mitchell stands as the symbol of persistence’s quiet power—the dark horse with a mane of fire. From rejection’s sting to redemption’s embrace, his “Zombie” isn’t just a song; it’s a manifesto. And as The Voice hurtles toward its December finale, one thing is clear: the stage didn’t make Ryan unstoppable. He was always there, waiting for the world to turn up the volume.
What happens next? The Playoffs will test if his roar sustains, if Reba’s guidance sharpens his edge into something unbreakable. Fans speculate wild: a duet with Walsh on Eagles classics? A surprise steal in the Lives? But for now, in the afterglow of that haunting fade-out, Ryan Mitchell has done the impossible. He’s turned a whisper into a roar that echoes far beyond the red chairs— a reminder that in the brutal beauty of the chase, the underdog’s bite is often the sweetest.
