Viral sensation DHRUV released the official music video of his smash runaway hit “Double Take” last Sept. 17. It's his first-ever music video.
Not every aspiring artist can catch lightning in a bottle and run away with it, especially in the fashion that Dhruv did. Raised in Singapore, with roots in India and the UK, Dhruv is a 22-year-old singer-songwriter. Inspired by the likes of Frank Ocean, The Beatles, and Amy Winehouse.
Dhruv started composing melodies at an early age and had written hundreds of songs on his bedroom piano by the time he started posting them on the internet. After releasing a series of acoustic demos on SoundCloud and amassing a small following on the platform, he formally debuted in 2019 with “Double Take”, a song he wrote about “how dizzying falling in love with a friend can feel”. And in 2021, the song enjoyed a strong resurgence thanks to Tiktok.
“DoubleTake” has amassed an audience of its own and inspired countless videos from all over the world. As of press time the song has garnered over 112 million streams and counting on Spotify while his official audio video has over 31 million views on YouTube. And with the huge clamor from fans for a proper music video, the official music video can potentially duplicate and even eclipse the latter figure in record time.
“The song is about falling in love with a friend,” Dhruv said. “It’s about that confusing switch, when you see someone in one way, then you switch and you see him/her differently and you don’t really know what happened or why it’s happening. It can be quite scary at times. So that’s the inspiration of the song. I worked on it with my friend Frankie (Scoca, producer). When we did ‘Double Take’, it was the second time I worked with him. He was a great collaborator. I usually write all my music myself, the lyrics, the melody all by myself, and he really supports that and he built a world around the song.
He followed “Double Take” up with the releases of “Moonlight” and “Vulnerable” in 2020, both of which went on to achieve comparable levels of success (collectively amassing over 22 million streams) and offered promising glimpses of what his first album might sound like. 2021 will see the release of his first body of work, one that uniquely combines his pop and R&B influences, and is set to cement his name on a global stage.
And watch out for more of him this year, as he’s set to release new music. “I have a project that's coming out very, very soon. ‘Double Take’ has been confusing because it’s a song that came out two years ago and then all this happened and it’s been the most amazing sideline away from that. I don’t want to be known for just that one song. I’ve been making music my whole life and I’m very conscious about marrying my old songs with some of the new stuff that’s coming out. There’s a new single coming out at the end of the month, and there’s more new music coming out at the end of the year,” Dhruv said.
“It feels different, but it has my signature on it,” he elaborated. “Like everything is me, I hope that people can hear that. I just love making pop music. It’s not an extremely experimental thing that people are not gonna get into, but it’s definitely different. The themes of the album are about coming into yourself, learning about who you are not just through love, but also through different experiences. Especially in this pandemic, by being away from normal life. I think it’s not only about romantic love, but also about self-love.”
With all this record of early success that he’s attaining, DHRUV could very well be the new global viral star in pop music.