Regularly racking up so many streams it looks like someone fell asleep on the number bit of their keyboard, D4VD is well and truly breaking through.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Patrick Gunning.

We've woken d4vd up. Currently on tour, it's 10:47 in his time zone, but he normally rolls out of bed around midday, so he's a little hazy. He's no average teenager, though, and he's often late out of bed because he's stayed up into the early hours of the morning making music.

Practically the definition of bedroom pop, d4vd's (real name David Burke) rapid ascent is the result of making music on his phone in his sister's wardrobe in Houston, quickly catching the ear of labels and signing to Darkroom Records – home to Billie Eilish and Holly Humberstone – barely a year after his first release.

Initially just making music to soundtrack Fortnite montages he was posting on YouTube, the songs gained traction on their own, leading d4vd to switch career paths and move away from wanting to be a professional video game player to being a full-time musician. When 'Romantic Homicide', the melancholy emo-driven breakup track, went viral last summer, it sealed the deal.

"Honestly, I think it's the relatability," d4vd says of his music's quick and vast connection with his audience. "I feel like in this generation, my sadder music seems to be the most popular at the moment. I feel like when everybody feels misunderstood, it's kind of cool to have an artist that you gravitate to who's able to describe it in words and melodies and lyrics and production elements and stuff like that, to where you feel a connection to artists on a more personal level."

His debut EP 'Petals to Thorns', made up of tracks he'd produced on his phone and dropped sporadically throughout 2022, plus some unheard ones, tells the story of a relationship from beginning to breakup via the lo-fi indie sound d4vd quickly made his signature. As would become common with his career, the story came around by accident.

"I'm so nonchalant with a lot of stuff I do. I don't want to force anything, but then I end up doing it anyways. So I was making a bunch of songs in 2022 for Fortnight montages, and they thematically fit together inadvertently. Then, when I was working on an EP, I realised I had so much music out and so much unreleased music, too, that I could just put together puzzle pieces.

"People were telling me you start from ground one, you figure out what your thing is, and you figure out what you want the motive to be, and then you start making the songs. And I was like, what? I have all the songs already. So it was easy to find that theme, and I used a symbolic rose for it because you look at a rose and it's so beautiful, but then you pick it up and get stabbed. For the EP, you've heard it, and it was beautiful, but then, at the end, you feel sad and self-reflective. And it's like to study yourself: was this relationship with another person, or was it a relationship with myself?"

Never doing things the conventional way, d4vd's first tour took place before he'd ever been to a gig at all. Part of that was a result of only hearing Christian music until his late teens, leaving him with no awareness of popular culture, but it was also likely due to his age and coming up during the lockdown years. Nevertheless, it hadn't stopped him from going on a huge tour across Europe and North America, recently extending the dates to Asia.

"I wasn't nervous, but I was sceptical of how it felt because I didn't want to have any previous influence on how I performed based on what I've seen. It was like I was an audience member at the same time I was performing, which was cool because I got to see how people reacted to the energy. On this tour right now, the 'Petals To Thorns' tour, I've crafted my entire stage presence, and it's very natural and not forced at all, which is cool."

d4vd seems very aware of the expectations to deliver a wow-worthy show every time. Despite this, he's shaking off any pressure no problem.

"I wouldn't say it was a lot of pressure," he says. "But I felt like, especially for the type of music that I make, I have to have a certain standard and not be up there just holding the microphone to stand still for an hour. I tried to mix in a bunch of different genres to try to make the show as entertaining as possible and just feed off of the crowd."

His first concert – aside from his own – was SZA's 'SOS' tour at Madison Square Garden, an artist who he's since found a fan in, and in a full circle moment, he'll be opening up for her on the second US leg of that very tour this autumn.

With bigger and bigger rooms to fill, d4vd is starting to outgrow his bedroom producer beginnings. He notes that working on collaborations (that'd be the 'This Is How It Feels' with fellow indie popster Laufey and 'Superbloodmoon' with labelmate Holly Humberstone) has pushed him out of his comfort zone and into the studio. Still unfamiliar with the traditional process, he recently found himself standing in Alicia Keys' Oven Studios in New York, pulling out his phone in the booth because he didn't know how to use the $3000 mic in front of him.

"I'm very used to being alone while I make music," he explains, "So it's a very therapeutic, self-reflective process for me, and making music in different ways has been like, okay, it feels like work now. It's like you have a coach in the room, and every time you do something, they push me to be better. I feel like the standard that I held on Bandlab is very different than the standard I hold in the studio, and it's very evident in the music that you hear or will hear in the future."

With touring also playing havoc with his usual process (the tour bus is too noisy to record on his phone properly), d4vd's next release is an extended cut of his debut EP, now titled 'Lost Petals', which plucks five extra songs out that didn't make it onto the EP the first time. Taking his time to select the tracks, he was still able to craft a story from the extras, finishing off where 'The Bridge' left a cliffhanger.

He describes it as the usual d4vd music, melancholy, lo-fi rock vibes, and a closing of a chapter of this book. "By the end of it, you feel like it's a fresh start. It feels like it's the next step," he says.

The next step for d4vd will be undoubtedly a big one. Before he joins the call, we're told he has big ambitions, although he might not give anything away yet. He remains tight-lipped about where he's going next, but with his huge SZA support slot coming up imminently and a d4vd cinematic universe that gives A24 a run for its money expanding rapidly, his vision is already far beyond his accidental start in music.