Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter
Darkroom/Interscope’s D4Vd debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 this week, recording most of the album through the popular music creation app BandLab.
By Ethan Millman
Music Editor
D4vd just locked the second-best debut on the Billboard 200 this week, and he did it almost entirely on his iPhone.
The rising alternative act’s Withered, his debut album following viral hits like “Here With Me” and “Romantic Homicide,” landed at No. 13 on the Billboard chart, sandwiched between Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft and Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
It’s a solid opening in its own right as the 20-year-old — who has 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify and is signed to Darkroom/Interscope — lands a top-15 debut for his first album, but it’s particularly notable given his recording process. While at-home recording has of course ballooned in the digital era as recording equipment has gotten cheaper and higher quality, making a successful commercial album on a six-inch phone screen is another step further.
Related Stories
“I think it shows how everything has shifted where you can do it at home, and you also really don’t need very much stuff either,” D4vd tells THR. “You don’t have to overdo it anymore. You don’t need to book out Westlake [the studio in West Hollywood] and put together all these things, it’s a different way of working now, and it works so well for people who aren’t able to get those kinds of things early on in their career.”
For years, D4vd — real name David Burke — has recorded his music on BandLab, the music creation platform most often used on mobile devices, which has grown increasingly popular among young music makers. BandLab operates on a freemium model, with many basic features like virtual instruments and vocal editing available free of charge, though some features like music distribution to streaming services are an additional fee. It’s part social media service too, as users can share and comment on each other’s music in the app.
D4vd says the core of the album was built from beats he was sent on his phone, and he went out to London with a few producer friends to “lay the foundation and form some of the ideas” for the record. He then went back home to Houston where he fleshed out the songs and recorded most of Withered on his own, doing vocal takes from his sister’s closet directly into the phone. Depending on how hi fi or lo fi he’s going for, he’ll either use the microphone from a pair of Apple EarPods or plug in a higher quality external mic.
Withered includes songs like “Crashing,” which features Kali Uchis,” as well as the hit “Feel It,” which was written for Amazon Prime Video’s Invincible and has since been certified gold by the RIAA.
“Romantic Homicide,” D4vid’s biggest song with 1.5 billion Spotify streams since its 2022 release, is one of BandLab’s marquee hits. For Withered, D4vd estimates about 80 percent of the record was made on his phone. BandLab tells The Hollywood Reporter this is the first album produced mainly with its software to make the albums chart.
Meng Ru Kuok, the company’s CEO, says the milestone reflects BandLab’s broader goal of serving a younger digitally native clientele who’ve primarily used their phones rather than computers their whole lives. BandLab has over 100 million users, Kuok says.
“I think the generational shift has already accepted that things start first on your phone, whether it’s using tools like Capcut to edit videos and being mobile first on that or making music,” Kuok says. “Desktop is the follow up for them. We started BandLab 10 years ago. The idea at the very beginning of being able to empower people with just a mobile phone, a pair of headphones and a dream is something that felt necessary back then, more so now.”
BandLab of course isn’t the only mobile-focused music platform that’s powered hits. Steve Lacy, for example, has spoken extensively about using GarageBand on his iPhone. (D4vd called Lacy an inspiration, noting he was watching his TED Talk recently.)
Kuok says about 25 percent of BandLab’s users are based out of the U.S., and he says the focus remains on accessibility, particularly given that music creation options in more developing markets are still limited.
“The hero in this story is someone like D4vd. We’re in an industry where there’s no one right way to do things,” Kuok says. “Hopefully he inspires more people to try something different. This milestone is a career milestone to me, because it represents the seriousness of music like this not just as viral hits but bonafide album charting industry success. It’s special.”
D4vd grew up an avid gamer, and in his teens he started uploading Fortnite videos on YouTube. He started making music for his videos in part to avoid copyright issues, setting him down his path in pop music as the gaming community took to his songs.
“There’s two sides of my brain when it comes to making music because I came from the gaming world. In gaming, you start off on a console like a PS5 and then if you want to go professionally, you need a PC,” D4vid says. “You have to upgrade the CPU, get a new graphics card, you’ve got to do all that to play at a high level. But music is a subjective sport. I don’t view the studio as better than my phone. I don’t view this crazy expensive engineer or crazy expensive producer as better than my phone or the YouTube producers I made my biggest hits with.”
As he made his ascent, he signed a record deal and would open for SZA on 2023’s SOS Tour. D4vd calls Withered a return to his roots. He started working on the album about two-and-a-half years ago, and matching his floral aesthetic (his two previous EPs are called Petals to Thorns and The Lost Petals), he describes the album’s symbolism as “when a flower grows, it also dies and returns back to the soil that it grew out of.”
Amid a whirlwind as he grew more famous and took on the life of a pop artist, D4vd hoped Withered could help him return to what drove him to music in the first place. “I was homeschooled in high school, to go from sitting in a room all day doing assignments and playing Fortnite to being on tour with SZA and having to try and make music in that time too, there’s only so much you can take before it starts to overflow,” D4vd says. “I was looking to find the magic I feel I lost the past two years and find the passion for writing again.”
Withered is more introspective than D4vd’s been in the past too, drawing more focus from his own life experiences such as homeschooling, losing relationships and friendships, as opposed to the more “vicarious” writing he’d done before. The record explores themes of loss and grief and D4vd calls the album “essentially a goodbye letter to me.”
“I wrote ‘Romantic Homicide’ about ending a relationship when I’d never even been in a relationship before,” D4vd says. “It’s an interesting process of going from a storyteller to actual conduit for my own experiences. It’s harder. With the element of not experiencing something I’m writing about, there was an element of fantasy to it. I could paint any picture I wanted. But when writing about my life, there’s a finite amount of things I can say because I want to be authentic.”
With Withered out, D4vd takes the tour on the road this summer. Will he be moving on from his DIY setup after that? He doesn’t think so, saying this is how he wants to work for the “foreseeable future.”
“I have the opportunity to experiment again, find new sounds and try to find ways to innovate my own sound and see where the state of music is at after the tour is over too,” he says. “The internet moves so fast. There’s a million different genres every day. I’ll try and stay current and stay me.”
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter
Send us a tip using our anonymous form.
