daine: “I used to think that only weird people liked my music… but maybe it can be for everyone”

There was once a time in daine’s life where she kept her musical horizons narrow – if it wasn’t rock, she wasn’t interested. Despite coming of age in a musical climate where twenty one pilots ruled and artists were taking hammers to genre boundaries, she clung onto this mindset. And she had particular scorn for the emerging wave of emo rap: “I was super against it,” daine remembers. “I was like, ‘These people are posers, this is cringe.’ It was like absolute sin.”

Then, she found a point where her tastes and the emo rap world intersected. She discovered that Adam McIlwee – former frontman of Tigers Jaw – was part of the emo rap collective GothBoiClique, where he performed, alongside the genre’s late pioneer Lil Peep, under the name Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. daine opened her mind, and soon began to call herself a fan. It became her gateway drug to pop music (to her younger self’s dismay), and eventually the burgeoning hyperpop explosion that began a few years later.

Without this revelation, daine wouldn’t be the musician she is today. These two chalk-and-cheese sides to her music taste melded to form a style she describes as ‘future emo’, overlaying glitching hyperpop hooks on warm, fuzzy guitar lines, complete with an otherworldly sci-fi aesthetic that reflects her hope to give her fans a means of escape. “I want things to feel otherworldly because the world’s maybe a little bit not cool right now,” she explains. “Nobody is happy with world events right now. My music is fun, I can’t be literal with it.”

A need to escape from an oftentimes sad and scary planet is a highly relatable sentiment, particularly pertinent to the fraught situation with the pandemic that’s played out over the last couple of years. And so too has it had a jarring effect on daine’s attempt to break through into public consciousness: “The single releases were super-slow due to the pandemic. I wasn’t really hitting a stride. I wasn’t getting into the momentum of being an artist.” Plans for 2020 were delayed to 2021, in the hope things would be better, but then the situation would deteriorate further, not helped by the more constant disruption daine faced in her native Australia due to the government’s zero-COVID policy. In fact, her home state of Melbourne took one of the strictest approaches in the country to stopping the spread of the virus.

It also means that the songs that comprise daine’s debut mixtape, Quantum Jumping, amount to more of a time capsule than a snapshot of her current mindset. She was around 15 or 16 when she wrote them, worlds away from the place she’s now in at 19. This material remains mostly untouched from its original incarnation, with a few tweaked lyrics, and pop futirist Lonelyspeck was brought in to give things a fresh coat of paint. “I have such a bad relationship with this, honestly,” daine says. “I was angsty and I’d just had my first break up. It’s kind of cringe to think back on it now, but at the time, it felt so huge. I don’t think I could write like that again, because I’m so different now. [My songwriting] would sound so much more resilient now. I couldn’t write anything with the same sort of emotional potency.”

Without an opportunity to play live, the pandemic also meant it took a while before daine truly felt like an artist. “I just felt like someone who hangs out at their house and doesn’t have a job, even though, technically, it is a job. I think for something to feel real, it has to have a physical impact on your daily environment, whether that’s going to the studio, working with your friends or playing live.” It meant that when she eventually got to experience these more conventional parts of being an artist, it came as a shock: daine didn’t expect to hear 700 fans chanting her name as she stepped out onto the stage – frankly, she didn’t even expect them to sing her lyrics back to her. “I got kind of cocky, and I hit this state of flow. I was doing rock star shit, sitting on the edge of the stage, squatting, reaching my arm out to people.” Some of them cried, though she didn’t understand why. “I’m just me. Why are you crying?”

Considering where daine’s at now, and where she could go from here, that feeling must have changed considerably. She’s had Oli Sykes reach out directly to collaborate with her, resulting in the pulsing, emotionally charged number Salt. She’s even played mini golf with Charli XCX, who she counts as a mentor figure after they met at a festival (“She’s always there for me when shit hits the fan”).

And if it’s good enough for them, it’s more than good enough for the masses – eclectic yet accessible enough to offer a broad church that anyone, alternative or not, can congregate in. “I used to think that only weird people liked my music, but my mum, who’s a very no-bullshit person but only usually likes really bland pop music, really likes it,” daine grins. “It’s maybe not as difficult to digest as I thought. Maybe my music can be for everyone…”

It very well could be.

Quantum Jumping is out now

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