In Endless Awe & Agony, the debut album from Filipino Australian artist daine, fizzes over with voices like a shaken-up Pepsi. Woven throughout the hyperactive production are distortion-smothered field recordings and dialogue samples, chopped-up smatterings of daine’s own vocal, and the occasional canned “Woo!” On “Product of Profit (P.O.P),” daine themself is both angelic Jekyll and vengeful Hyde: “I’ll have your head,” they intone sweetly on the song’s lullaby-esque chorus, while screams rage in the background. It’s a visceral distillation of what they’re best known for: walking a winding path between disparate screamo and hyperpop influences. It also sounds like the exorcism of a lot of genuine frustration.
“I’ve been in the mud,” daine told NME recently, reflecting on the six years that led up to the release of their debut. The 23-year-old musician first broke through as a teenager in 2020, with a string of emo-cloud-rap singles. A nitecore remix of the angsty “Bloody Knees” caught the attention of Charli xcx, who tweeted a SoundCloud link to her followers. daine later counted Charli among their mentors, and continued to collect co-signs: releasing a collaborative single with Oli Sykes of British metal band Bring Me the Horizon, touring with yeule, and featuring on Ninajirachi’s “It’s You” (complete with ecstatic underscores remix). There should have been forward momentum, but instead they fell into the “mud” that many emerging pop artists find themselves wading in the 2020s: releasing a string of EPs and singles, then eventually being dropped by Warner Australia before releasing an official LP.
No score yet, be the first to add.
With this journey through the industry maze already in their rearview mirror at 23, it’s not surprising that much of daine’s debut—now arriving via indie label Pack—is preoccupied with themes of exploitation, public image, and the cost of success. daine has described the record as an experiment in ditching Auto-Tune and other “performative layers” they’ve used previously in order to reveal something more honest about themself. It’s the classic “most personal album yet” spiel, and lyrically, it doesn’t fully deliver: though the allusions to evil corporate entities and thwarted ambition are all there, they don’t coalesce into a story. But musically, it’s a leap forward for daine, who launches from their SoundCloud emo-pop roots into a fizzy synth-pop-meets-alt-rock sound that would sound just right closing an episode of Girls or Skins in 2012.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
