As the main songwriter and guitarist of Las Vegas emo act Panic! At The Disco, 23-year-old Ryan Ross found fame and fortune, selling over 2.2 million albums of his outfit’s debut LP, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. But despite the success of the “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” outfit’s second disc, 2008’s Pretty. Odd (which debuted at number one on the local ARIA charts), Ross chose to walk away – and now he’s got a brand new band, Young Veins.

“I just couldn’t keep on trying to please people. It was hindering my creative output, and I had to be honest with myself,” Ross confessed to music industry mag Billboard this week, when asked why he split (along with bassist Jon Walker) from his Panic! bandmates in July 2009. “I’ve talked a good amount about Panic!, but that’s because there hadn’t been much else going on with us until now.”

Ross and Walker (now on guitar) have joined forces with new bassist Andy Soukal, keyboardist Nick White and drummer Nick Murray for Young Veins, who’ll drop their debut album, Take a Vacation!, on Tuesday 8 June. “Hopefully once people hear the album and see us perform, those questions will sort of die down,” Ross says of his Panic! past.

New songs on the disc include “Cape Town” and “Dangerous Blues”, while the lead single will be the track “Charge”. The band are set to make their festival performance debut at the upcoming Bonnaroo festival in June; meanwhile Panic! continues on with frontman Brendon Urie and drummer Spencer Smith. “I forgot that being in a band was this much fun,” says Ross of his latest project.