Daffo – ‘Where The Earth Bends’ album review: The best of a new generation
Great songwriting has the power to completely overhaul something you’d otherwise consider fact. In a single soundbite or a clipped verse, the best songwriters can poke at a wall in your brain enough times for it to turn into a door.
Daffo, the solo project of Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based indie-alternative artist Gabi Gamberg, does this on their debut album, Where The Earth Bends, more than once. The 21-year-old faces insane scrutiny after blowing up on TikTok and releasing two highly praised EPs, with bark, bite, and refreshing honesty.
Veteran producer and mixer Rob Schnapf, who has previously worked with the likes of Elliott Smith and Beck, helms a sonic palette that is varied and inventive throughout. We are pulled from hooky rock openings, like ‘Get a Life’ and ‘Habit’, into delectable indie-folk confessions, into the Western-fused ‘Bad Dog’, into the punk-inflected ‘Go Fetch’, and out onto a twinkling horizon laden with power ballads and soft acoustic hits.
Across the album, I’m charmed, and a little jealous. For a record about life, thrill, torment, and rage in all its chaotic intricacies, everything works perfectly together. Daffo’s unique, broad voice is addictive and soft in all the right places, carrying the listener through cheeky remarks and playful double-entendres, such as “I hope when I’m in hell I’ll finally fit in well, I’ve got all these jokes I’ve been dying to tell.”
At the same time, the record is outrageously bold and remarkably brave. Daffo has left no stone unturned, no topic too big for their nimble pencil: we race through ruminations on life with obsessive-compulsive disorder, smoking habits, queer experiences of family, grief, shame, self-loathing, submission. “It’s so comfortable in here for a cage / it’s hard to notice all the chains,” they sing on the stand-out track ‘Absence Makes the Heart Grow’, where they propose the idiom, in our modern age, must be rethought. Daffo picks apart the lies we tell ourselves with glee and tact.
Where the Earth Bends is surprising at every turn. “We all grieve together, different things, while the highway sings,” Gamberg insists on the confessional ‘Unveiling’, which seems to bloat and stretch the modern take on songwriting, all specificities and locations unseen to the listener. It is a defiant message that might be adopted to explain the entire project: We all ‘feel’ together. No matter how different or polarised our experiences are becoming, we are all worthy of community.
On Where the Earth Bends, Daffo has found the thread that joins us all.
Defining track: ‘Go Fetch’ – On ‘Bad Dog’, Daffo treats us to a spell-binding, inventive, and confessional guitar track, weaving an often overwrought metaphor into their own world of signs. The sentiment is picked back up on ‘Go Fetch’, its album companion, fit with a kick, a smile, and a scream.
For fans of: Rob from Love Island.
A concluding comment from Daffo: “Rob from Love Island was live on Instagram with Beabadoobee and recommended my music. I think that’s so funny.”
Release date: September 26th, 2025 | Producer: Rob Schnapf | Label: Concord Records
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