‘Total surrender, that’s what healed me’: Daine came back from the brink and made a pop classic

Melbourne musician Daine has been reading Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick, and relating hard to the Girls’ creator’s experience making the hit show.

“So she’s 23, she’s signed her deal with HBO, she’s got all this attention and professional accolades, and she’s still broke, still figuring it out, still living with her parents, and she’s just dissociating. That’s where I’m at now,” Daine laughs.

To an ever-growing cohort of fans, including those who followed the singer’s earliest forays in emo-tinged hyperpop over five years ago, the 23-year-old’s debut album In Endless Awe & Agony might be the most anticipated local release in a generation. Its singles – including the deceptively effervescent PQC and Love Love (Love Love) – have lit up the internet, drawn praise from The New York Times and Pitchfork, and been remixed by fellow online favourites Bassvictim and Porches.

In the weeks ahead of its release, Daine’s Instagram has highlighted the level they’re playing at, with photos posted from fancy parties in Los Angeles and New York alongside pop stars such as Adela, or at international festivals sharing the stage with fellow half-Filipina pop-savant Underscores. Daine was the sole feature last year on friend Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer, a move that has primed them for a similar burst of overseas adoration.

It’s why Dunham’s Famesick is suddenly hitting. “I’m still living with my mum and dad, I still don’t know what’s going on, but it seems to all be happening at once, and I don’t think you can ever prepare for that,” Daine says. “I had been preparing for, like, seven years but I kind of gave up, and now that I gave up, it’s finally happening, and I’m like, ‘Oh! Okay!’”

The wind is blowing a springtime tornado when we meet at a coffee shop in Potts Point in late September. Daine, bundled in a fur coat and high leather boots, has flown up from Melbourne, ever hustling amid the album’s press cycle (after our interview, she’ll hurry off to another at Spotify HQ).

In the middle of our impromptu photo shoot at the cafe, I watch a French woman – a young tourist enamoured with this odd scene of Australian celebrity – strike up a conversation with Daine. The pair chat excitedly and exchange contact details. Daine’s magnetism – today their eyes are an insane shade of yellow – is palpable. “This always happens,” their bandmate Anna Cusack tells me as we watch on. There’s an inevitability to Daine’s current breakout moment, but it’s been a circuitous route.

The first time I interviewed Daine about five years ago, they told me with a brashness uncommon in local artists that they’d be a pop star. At the time they were signed to Warner Music – given a deal at 16 off the strength of early SoundCloud tracks – and touted as “hyperpop’s great hope” in Australia. Charli XCX was a mentor, and they were regularly flight-hopping to LA to work with Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs, the genre’s most revered weirdo in the States.

Barely two years later, still signed to Warner Music but working a bar job to make ends meet, Daine offered a more sobering look at the reality of major label life, of the endless pressure and grind they felt to justify their spot on Warner Music’s roster. Then in 2024, Daine revealed in an Instagram post that Warner Music had dropped them. After years of hustle, they had no record label, no management and were thousands of dollars in debt.

“It was a necessary process I needed to go through,” says Daine now, with the easy acceptance of someone who’s made it through to the other side. “I didn’t know anything back then. I was 16, got found by a major, and I think as a developing artist that can be counterintuitive because you just get lost in that system. Major labels in Australia are understaffed; they don’t have the money to support and develop an artist.

“I know how that world works now, and I think in the early days of a career, it’s better to do it independent. A major label, they don’t care about their losses, really, because they account for that every year. They know they’re gonna lose a shit-tonne of money on a shit-tonne of people.”

In their post announcing that Warner Music had dropped them, Daine included a celebratory dance, a sort of sardonic “I’m finally free!” Is that what they really felt or was that projection? “I mean, I was excited to see what was next. But it led into a dark period of my life because I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and I wasn’t entirely certain of my creative identity yet. But I needed that freedom to do some soul-searching.”

A sentence in the album’s notes outlines the turmoil that ensued. “The journey toward In Endless Awe & Agony emerged from one of the most difficult periods of their life, marked by the loss of their grandmother, the end of their longest relationship to date, and time spent in a psychiatric ward,” it reads.

That’s a lot, I say. “It was,” Daine deadpans. “I was in a place of financial hardship. My career was not doing well. I had bad people around me. Just a lot of bad things happened at that time. I thought nothing would ever change, that it would never get better, that there was nothing for me to do in this life.

“I was remarkably detached from everything. I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s okay if this is over now.’ I was very casual about my suicide attempt. I ate a bunch of pasta, I sat on the couch, and then I OD’d. I woke up having a seizure in hospital.”

A mighty wind almost knocks us off our stools as Daine retells this story; it feels almost metaphysical amid the moment’s intensity. “I don’t know … It was just hard,” Daine says. “I just think we should extend a lot of grace to artists, especially in such a career that can be so relentless. Life can just go belly up.”

It took Daine about a year to get back on their feet. In the midst of recovery, they leaned on their established collaborators, local electronic producers and close friends Ninajirachi, Lonelyspeck, Darcy Baylis and Lucy Blomkamp. They rented a beach house where they worked through Daine’s first post-Warner EP, last year’s excellent I Want the Light to Swallow Me Whole. The EP’s churning centrepiece Fell Out of Heaven, at once gothically dark and angelic, dove headfirst into Daine’s torment.

“I think the art that’s come from that point onwards has just been very real and just what I’m feeling,” says Daine. “There’s no pressure on me now to be like, ‘Oh, I need to be big, I need to prove myself.’ Desperation is a stinky cologne. I think the new work is resonating with people because they can smell that it’s not desperate.”

Daine has described In Endless Awe & Agony as a concept album based on the Jungian individuation arc, the “psychological integration of the conscious and unconscious self”. It is, in essence, the sound of someone healing.

Daine was initially unconvinced by the album’s earliest demos. They’d get home from the studio crying, throw things against the wall, convinced they couldn’t write music any more. They kept the work private for ages, before showing their ex-boyfriend – musician Curtis Everett Pawley – who executive-produced the album.

“I watched his face drop when I showed him these awkward demos where I’m speaking really candidly about my life in a really corny way. He had a visceral reaction, like, ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever made.’ I was like, ‘What? It’s terrible!’ But that was coming from a place of insecurity and self-hate. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge those parts of myself, but doing that was the best thing I’ve ever done for my well-being.”

In lead single PQC, Daine confronts the darkest moments of her career with radical acceptance. “I lost a lot of money on this, but I guess it happens/ They all want me dead, but I still care about them/ So, if they break my bones again, it won’t even matter,” they sing.

“I’ve already lost everything and been in such a deep world of agony. So whatever – career failures, mishaps – it doesn’t matter. PQC is about total surrender, that’s what healed me. That’s what got me out of that rut because it’s freeing to just be like, ’Okay, if everything has already been so f—ed, let’s just hang around a little longer and see if it gets unf—ed.”

For Daine’s longtime fans, PQC was a remarkable reintroduction. All of a sudden pastel hues had replaced Daine’s signature goth-black; sing-song cheerleader chants replaced screamo breakdowns. The single marked a full embrace of the innate pop sensibility – Daine and Baylis have coined it “tweemotronica” – that always made their work so appealing.

“Because I healed,” Daine explains. “I stopped resonating with a darker visual aesthetic because my mental health improved. PQC is a very sad song because it’s about a lot of painful things, but it’s also an embrace of that. I wanted it to feel whimsical and liberating.”

On Reddit threads and in Instagram comments, fans have sought to decode what PQC stands for. “That’s a state secret,” Daine says, smiling slyly.

The closest I’ve come is “post-quantum cryptography”, but I don’t even know what that is. “Look, I can probably tell you but... No, I can’t. I can’t, no,” Daine teases. “We can do it like PQC, though.”

Sure, whatever that means. Much of In Endless Awe & Agony embraces PQC’s vulnerability, both thematically and sonically. On Supervillain, a sweetly sinister Crystal Castles-style confection, Daine sings of their “bruised knees plastered in the magazines”. Spider-man and Wishing Well are stripped back ballads that play like anti-folk. When I interviewed Daine years ago, they’d said of their process: “As long as I have autotune and 808s, I’m set.” The new music eschews both.

“We abandoned them on this record. I hid behind a lot of sonic distortion and effects in the past because I was afraid of myself. I was young and deeply insecure that I’m not a proficient vocalist. But I’ve realised lately that music is not a skill-based sport. There’s no leaderboard. If an abstract painter can’t do realism, it doesn’t mean they’re a shit painter. It’s just a different type of art,” says Daine.

“Also, being an artist is so inherently humiliating. I’ve always felt so much embarrassment, so I can deal with a little bit more. I wanted honest songwriting. I wanted it to feel awkward. I wanted to peel back a lot of layers. I was like, ‘Maybe people will actually like me being me?’ And they have, so I’m really happy about that. I was scared, but I had a gut feeling it would work.”

Daine’s In Endless Awe & Agony is out now. They will perform at Sydney’s Metro Social on November 13 and 14, Brisbane’s Black Bear Lodge on November 19, and Melbourne’s Max Watts on November 21. They will also be at Laneway Festival from February 12-21 and Golden Plains Festival from March 6-8.

If you are worried about your own or someone else’s mental health, you can contact the Mental Health Line on 1800 011 511 and Lifeline 13 11 14.

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