On the Rise
Daffo

I doubt Dad is as sorry as he is proud given Gamberg is announcing their debut album, Where The Earth Bends – a title inspired by a moment in their childhood. Indeed, it wasn’t just Gabi: all the kids in the Gamberg household were forced to play an instrument. “One person in one part of the house would be singing something and then another person in the other part of the house would start singing that,” Gamberg tells me. “Someone was always yelling or singing. It was a very loud household.” After a brief and uninspiring tryst with the piano, Gamberg chose the violin. Then came the guitar, followed by some prolific teen songwriting, and then it was off to music school.

Five weeks at the Berklee College Summer Program introduced Gamberg to Hudson Pollock, now an L.A.-based musician and producer. As teens, Pollock invited Gamberg up to New Jersey to check out the thriving DIY music scene they were involved in. By the time Gamberg was 15, they were visiting New Jersey almost every weekend for shows and open mics.

When Gamberg talks about their friends from the New Jersey DIY scene, they openly gush, eager to name-drop their biggest supporters and collaborators. There, Gamberg met artists behind bands like Screenagers, Shallow Alcove, and quinnie. Despite Gamberg’s burgeoning success, they have not abandoned the scene that helped cultivate their talent and feed their life’s purpose. It seems likely they never will: Gamberg met both the drummer and guitarist for the Daffo touring band at that very first New Jersey show. “Even now, that whole scene is still a part of my life,” Gamberg confirms.

This community of artists and musicians enabled and uplifted Gamberg’s performance: “I learned from watching them perform,” they say. “I was so lucky to be a part of this scene that was so exploratory when I was young. I was able to play all of these shows and hone my craft as a young person versus being a songwriter and being thrown into it as an adult.” (For all the harmonica connoisseurs out there, Gamberg has been known to invite an audience member to play the harmonica with them on stage.)

After brewing in this New Jersey scene for a while, next, almost predictably, Gamberg told their parents they wanted to drop out of high school to become a musician – move to the big city, all that jazz. “I was like, fuck this, I’m going to New Jersey, that’s what I want to do,” they tell me.

But their professor parents wouldn’t let it be that simple. Instead of letting their youngest of three fly the coop too early, they encouraged Gamberg to enrol in a performing arts high school. Gamberg cites this formal music education as the most outsized influence – besides the New Jersey DIY scene – on their songwriting capabilities. It was in a songwriting class where they “learned what makes a song more effective, lyrically, melodically – what pierces through and makes things more memorable.”

Songs like “Poor Madeline” and “all the time” from their previous EPs Pest (2023) and Crisis Kit (2021) do exactly that. On theme with Gamberg’s age – 21 – their songs ruminate on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Childhood fades to memory, sympathy wanes, “adulting” is expected, and everyone is tired, scared, and underpaid. Yet Gamberg has the ability to capture sentiments so common, ones that have become clichés, or worse, memes, and turn them into something like an epiphany. Suddenly, the feeling I want to die, perhaps the most proliferated sentiment in the 21st century – if not every century before it – becomes new in “Carrot Fingers”. “I think about dying all the time / And what I’ve come to realise / Is I’m more scared of livin’” goes one lyric.

Gamberg’s lyrics should be praised for their poetic qualities. A lyric in the penultimate song on their forthcoming album, “Sideways”, goes, “I can’t say what I mean / So I let it out sideways / And if I could say what I mean / I’d still let it out / Sideways,” recalling a line from an Emily Dickinson poem: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The word “sideways,” as opposed to “slant,” is longer and more disoriented, as Gamberg’s diction captures a contemporary poetic.

In other words, the world in which creators make their art, where cheap distractions and social dysphoria circle the drain with over indulgence, will inevitably creep into the art itself. Songs like “Quick Fix”, in which plastic and cancer recur, proves paranoia and microplastics have seeped into our subconscious, and even our songs. This ability to summon the earnest from the conventional makes Daffo prescient.

No matter how far Gamberg will go, their family remains a driving influence on their music. Even their performing name, Daffo, came from the daffodils that popped up in the yard of suburban Pennsylvania where they grew up. As ubiquitous as daffodils are in Spring, Daffo’s music – although humility makes them disagree – lets off a rising steam of originality. Gamberg’s combination of formal training and unique guitar tunings leaves their music to run on “vibes.” The result is a folky twang, a twist on the singer-songwriter genre, that makes Daffo an artist to stick with.