Daffo is at the mercy of no one on debut album ‘Where the Earth Bends’

Posted On September 26, 2025September 26, 2025

It was Kathy Acker who said, “I cannot write from boredom. I can only write from thrill.” When I tell Daffo, tired and blinking through a Zoom call in their softly-lit Los Angeles abode, their eyes widen. Yes, exactly.

After our interview, when I frantically attempt to verify the quote, I find I’ve conflated several ideas and protected words into the mouth of the 1970s punk icon. No matter, because through a subsequent constellation of influences—like the new Wednesday album, or the Rocky Horror Picture show, or Tik-Tok and shoddy songwriting courses–together we uncovered what is at the heart of Daffo’s debut album: torment, thrill. Life itself. “If I’m not writing, I’m at least, you know, soaking up my life so that I can write something good,” they admit.

Daffo, real name Gabi Gamberg, is only 21 years old and has already enjoyed major success, such as touring with Blondshell, Annie DiRusso, and Illuminati Hotties. Their second-ever TikTok post gained millions of views almost instantly.

Daffo looks back at this honestly, sharing, “I just had so many eyes on me for the first time.”

Debut jitters

Their first full-length, Where the Earth Bends, released in the wake of the 2021 EP Crisis Kit and the 2021 EP Pest, is a chance to pirouette before the prying eyes and convince them of the longevity of a sound that gained success through an app made for quick forgetting.

“To give it out to the scrutiny of the world is a little scary,” they laugh.

After they admit to the pressure of a debut, especially in light of such unexpected success, I ask what might convince them of their own success. I brace myself for the typical answers: Spotify numbers, dream collaborations, maybe enough money to live comfortably.

Instead, in a happy echo of the inventive and always-surprising twists of the new album, they surprise me: “Success? If a song feels really good when I play it,” they say.

When you base your success on quantitative values, they muse, “You are at the mercy of other people.” And while they “love to connect with people, and love community and intimacy,” they protect an undeniable sense of self that resists any form of compromise.

This is one of the strongest themes in the new album: scathing self-upheaval for the sake of art. Daffo has the irrevocable power shared with only a few great modern songwriters, like Allegra Krieger and Phoebe Bridgers, of turning the specifically personal into the universal. On ‘Sideaways’, they propose a perfect explanation of this meaning-making: “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.”

But living and creating at the mercy of nobody else gets tricky when they realise that living off your music means you are entirely “at the whims of other people”.

Their 2023 hit, ‘Poor Madeline’, is still one of their most listened to. Looking toward Where the Earth Bends, they muse, “I think the songwriting is better, but I know that I’m going to be fighting off the people saying that ‘Poor Madeline’ is my best song for like, the rest of my career.”

They know that if the music bombs, their dream will quickly turn into a wispy memory, one they might recall longingly from a desk in a nondescript office. The stakes are high given that music is their entire life: “If I’m not on tour and I’m not, like, actively recording, like, What the hell am I doing with myself?”

Selfless selfishness and songwriting sensitivity

This explains the electric charge at the centre of the debut, on which Gamberg plays guitar, violin, Mellotron, drums, and more. Gamberg dropped out of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University as soon as they had the chance to take their music on tour. The writing classes, in and amongst the overwhelming city, felt clinical and inauthentic. The indie-folk expansiveness in Where the Earth Bends takes root in the Philadelphia suburbs, a place of magnificent wonder, where they grew up, and the DIY scene in New Jersey, where they honed the rage and the whimsy. Enough saying, more doing, they insist.

Gamberg has evolved from such humble origins, a notion they notice themselves: “The way I’ve presented these songs is more true to myself. I feel like I’ve grown up a little,” they smile. Again, the skittish spectre of Kathy Acker, who excavated her entire life for the grotesque, shocking, but completely revolutionary works that came after, leans over us, as Gamberg ruminates: “The more selfish I am about my writing, the more I’m actually writing for other people.”

It takes me a while to come round to this idea. For the many words I’d use to describe Gamberg, selfish isn’t one of them. But, they convince me, consistently writing for yourself in an industry that demands otherwise is selfish. “I really try hard to write for myself and no one else, because I think that that actually is, in a way, writing for other people,” they add. The line between creator and listener might first need to be emboldened before it is eradicated. No one knows this more than Daffo.

We return often to the idea of writing for yourself as writing for survival. Gamberg admits to being a “very, very sensitive person,” often struggling to let emotions pass through them. The act of songwriting is, they say, putting everything in a little jar, “And then sometimes I get to look at that jar and say, OK, it still hurts, but now it’s in a jar. And now I have a little collection of them.” We discuss shame as a poison, as a feeling in your gut, in your throat, one that lends itself to incarceration in their teeny army of jars. This might be beneficial for the interior design of a neurodivergent mind, but the analogy is deeper than that: Upon the glimmery surface of a small jar, we might catch a glimpse of our own reflection staring back.

Along with the heavy investigations into embodied language, Gamberg takes one large sweep at the modern art industry. In doing so, they aren’t just criticising our global media economy, they’re adding to it. Take ‘Absence Makes the Heart Grow’, a twist on the popular idiom that Gamberg has brandished as obsolete, all scuzzy and mercurial. Their effort was even praised by Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman, who somehow found the singer-songwriter’s number and praised them out of the blue. “I geeked out. It was so cool,” they gushed.

These songs don’t just exist in isolation; Songwriting can be a lonely, self-indulgent journey, and touring with obsessive-compulsive disorder and ADHD can only be an extreme feat, but Gamberg never really complains.

Instead, they are reflective and honest about the lived reality of performing such emotional songs every night: “My headspace is going to be different, the way that I emote is going to be different, and the way that all of the people playing the song is going to be different. We feed off of each other’s energy; I feed off of the audience’s energy in a big way.” Daffo might just be the most honest artist of their generation.

On Where the Earth Bends, Daffo defines and readjusts the undefinable, brutally and often selfishly, excavating their own experiences to make ours seem finally surmountable. In their own words, “When you take a picture of a ghost, it becomes a lot less scary.”

Related Topics