daine's Debut Album Arrives After Six Years in the Major-Label Mud

daine released their debut album, In Endless Awe & Agony, on indie label Pack — after six years, several EPs, and one dropped Warner Australia deal. The Filipino Australian artist is 23. That timeline deserves its own liner notes.

The record fizzes with voices, as one reviewer put it, like a shaken-up Pepsi. The hyperactive production carries distortion-smothered field recordings, dialogue samples, chopped fragments of daine's own vocals, and the occasional canned "Woo!" It's busy. Deliberately so.

What does the album sound like?

On "Product of Profit (P.O.P)", daine plays both angelic Jekyll and vengeful Hyde. "I'll have your head," they intone sweetly on the lullaby-esque chorus, while screams rage in the background. The track distills what the Melbourne-raised musician is known for: a winding path between screamo and hyperpop. It also sounds, per the review, like the exorcism of a lot of genuine frustration.

Lyrically, the verdict is mixed. The album's themes — exploitation, public image, the cost of success — don't quite coalesce into a story, despite the evil-corporate allusions and thwarted ambition. Musically, though, it's a leap: daine launches from SoundCloud emo-pop roots into a fizzy synth-pop-meets-alt-rock sound that would close an episode of Girls or Skins in 2012 quite nicely. That's the comparison. It fits.

How did daine get here?

"I've been in the mud," daine told NME, reflecting on the six years before this release. The mud was real. They broke through as a teenager in 2020 with a string of emo-cloud-rap singles. A nitecore remix of the angsty "Bloody Knees" caught Charli xcx's attention; Charli tweeted the SoundCloud link to her followers. daine later counted Charli among their mentors.

The co-signs kept coming:

• A collaborative single with Oli Sykes of British metal band Bring Me the Horizon
• Touring with yeule
• A feature on Ninajirachi's "It's You", complete with an ecstatic underscores remix

There should have been forward momentum. Instead, daine fell into the mud that many emerging pop artists wade through in the 2020s: a string of EPs and singles, then being dropped by Warner Australia before ever releasing a full LP.

Is it the "most personal album yet"?

daine has described the record as an experiment in ditching Auto-Tune and other "performative layers" used previously, in order to reveal something more honest. That's the classic debut-album spiel. The lyrics don't fully deliver on it. The production does — the candor lives in the noise, not the notebook.

The album closes a chapter rather than opening one. Having survived the industry maze by 23, daine now has the catalogue, the scars and the indie deal to make the second record the interesting one.