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GUS DAPPERTON
sup. Binki saal | 21.00 UhrGUS DAPPERTON
If you’ve followed 25-year-old Gus Dapperton’s career from the bright and charming early singles and EPs to 2018’s full-length album Where Polly People Go to Read, you’ll have recognized that the singer-songwriter-producer has entered new territory on his latest release Orca. The album explores human pain and suffering, but also healing and redemption. Gus’s creative decisions in pursuit of a raw sound to match these raw emotions didn’t come easily. “I’m a huge advocate for putting myself in vulnerable positions in my music,” he says but admits that confronting these feelings “was a chance to be open that I was afraid of.” But he pushed himself and, with the help of his friends and family, came out on the other side stronger. Watch out for more new music to come in 2022!
BINKI
binki has always been a performer at his core. Born to Kenyan immigrants in Pennsylvania, he grew up on a steady diet of his older siblings’ music preferences But it wasn’t until studying to be an actor at UNC Greensboro that he found himself gravitating toward music as a career. “You always get a high from performing, but plays are such a production,” he says. “Playing house shows felt a bit more accessible.” When it came time to put a name to the project, the choice was obvious: “binki is a name I’ve gone by since I was six or seven years old,” he explains. “My childhood friends would call me binki. My siblings called me binki.
Upon graduating, binki dropped his first single “Marco” and moved to New York City. It was there that audiences were first captivated by his new fusion of cavalier funk and bratty rock swagger, one further punctuated by subsequent singles “Wiggle,” “Sea Sick,” and “Heybb!” Through vigilant self-promotion and word of mouth, he quickly drummed up millions of streams, heavy rotational play on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, and spots on playlists such as Pollen, Lorem and Fresh Finds…
Rather than forcing the inevitable, he instead fought off the atrophy by sharpening his music theory skills and immersing himself in the catalogs of iconoclasts such as David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Lou Reed. Once quarantine clouds began to part, a new batch of “anti-love songs“ began to reveal themselves. “My first songs were based in reality, but it was really me fantasizing, for the most part, about what love could be,” binki says. “Now, I’m facing reality and it’s just more nuanced. It feels more honest, especially on a song like ‘Clay Pigeon.’”
