The third EP from Dillon van Rensburg, the Scottish teenager behind dvr, came together as he was struggling through a period of crippling migraines. The music on dirty tapes EP is woozy and welcoming, but dvr was using these songs to frame the most traumatic moment of his life. “I got diagnosed with chronic migraines in September 2020 and I finished the EP in February 2021,” he tells Apple Music. “My headspace in that time wasn’t fantastic, but it was really helpful to get all those feelings out through these five songs.” His music, he says, often feels like a collection of diary entries, songs that put a postmark on his frame of mind at the time. But, released almost a year after the EP’s completion, the R&B-tinged indie-pop, languid lo-fi folk, and dvr’s undeniable way with a hook here signal the arrival of a special talent. “Writing songs is a coping mechanism,” he says. “It’s how I get all my thoughts and feelings out.” Let dvr take you through dirty tapes EP, track by track.
“Dirty Tapes”
“The whole EP is an allegory of my relationship with my migraines, through my relationship with my girlfriend and my friends and everything. I had really bad brain fog. I didn’t know why at the time, but I wasn’t able to concentrate, I wasn’t able to hold conversations, and I had a really bad stutter. So, I was like, ‘Oh, it feels like dirty tapes.’ And that was basically it. All the things I talk about are real-life things that I just adjusted a little bit.”
“Stupid”
“This was the fourth song I made, in December 2020. I got fed up. It’s me going, ‘I can’t be bothered anymore,’ because I was in this cycle of getting sicker and sicker, and it was messing with all of my relationships, and it wasn’t a great point. The song starts off with me saying that I’m stupid at everything and, in the third verse, that I don’t want to be stupid. It was kind of a reckoning with myself and how I wanted to move forward. It’s about how I ruin relationships through not being able to function really with my illness.”
“Lowlife” (with Kenny Beats)
“Kenny said, ‘Let’s do a song,’ and then I sent him something, but I sent him a song that was for Kenny; it wasn’t really for me. And so, when he produced it, it was a really good song but not what I wanted to move forward with. And he felt the same way. So, I sent him the song that I made right after it, which was ‘Lowlife.’ It was very rudimentary. It sounded kind of like The Clash in the production. He got it back to me in March 2021 and it sounded really great. The whole song is very self-deprecating, but it’s also about trying to put yourself in a better spot.”
“Drugs”
“This was written at the lowest point. It was early January [2021], because I started trying to get back on the road to recovery and then I got hit with a really, really bad migraine that kept me in bed for two weeks. I couldn’t do anything. I was pretty wasted off all the pills that I was on, and I hadn’t slept for four days straight. I got Valium from the doctor, and the day after, I was feeling all weak and terrible and I stayed up till 2 am because I couldn’t sleep. I started playing guitar and the first thing I thought of was the chords to ‘Drugs.’ I spent from 2 am to 4 am on it, until I woke my dad up shouting the last chorus and he told me to go to sleep.”
“Tunnel Vision”
“I made this as the school term was coming to an end, so it felt like a point of finality. But it was about how you can focus on something so much that it ends up ruining it, like a relationship. It’s also about passing out. One of the symptoms I was getting a lot was I was just going unconscious. Beforehand, I would get this vision that cramps in on the sides of my eyes. I’d lose my peripheral vision and, eventually, I’d just black out. So, it’s a metaphor for a lot of things. I wanted to recreate sonically what I was feeling in my head, so I gradually made it louder and louder. I added more elements, and I thought that the crescendo to end on before I metaphorically passed out is a good final point for the EP.”