dhruv

In late May 2022, Dhruv Sharma reached a new nadir. Things had been going so well. He dipped out of Yale just two years into his degree, the music career he had been pursuing since he was a teenager in Singapore suddenly catalyzed by the runaway hit “double take,” as Dhruv. But at the start of 2022, he went to California for the first time, hoping to write his debut album with a slew of select songwriters there. Over five months, he participated in maybe eighty sessions, all abject failures. He felt both too guarded and exposed, the slickness of California and the machinery of music overwhelming his once-insular process. He flew to New Y ork without a single song, hoping a visit with an ex-boyfriend might pick him up. He was so nervous he scratched the stains from his hoody on the way to rendezvous. And that’s where he learned that his partner of two years had already moved on, that any possibility of redemption had vanished. He felt that his personal and professional lives were crumbling, that he’d been dropped into an episode of the worst sitcom ever without a clear exit.

So Dhruv went home to London and sat in his apartment with his little Yamaha keyboard. He brooded over those months in the States and slowly started to sing about them—“feeling like the main character,” he offered, “but in my own tragedy.” The song that emerged, “Tragedy,” became the cornerstone upon which he began to build Private Blizzard, an album that explores his season of despair with perfect candor and finds the hooks, the spirit, and the sound to move on. Its title borrowed from “The City Planners,” a Margaret Atwood poem he treasured as a closeted queer teenager in Singapore, Private Blizzard confronts self-doubt, loneliness, rejection, and malaise with a dozen shimmering neo-soul anthems and classic ballads that feel like Dhruv’s own cures, extended here to whomever else may need them.

Presented by Z|ART Agency GmbH.

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