Dan Croll

Merging folk influences with Paul Simon-esque melodies, electronic pulses, African polyrhythms, and incisive guitar lines, British singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dan Croll produces work marked by shifting textures and depth. Rapid praise greeted his 2014 U.K. Top 30 debut Sweet Disarray on Decca Records and the 2017 successor Emerging Adulthood.

Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, saw his birth in 1990; he spent his childhood in Trentham and first turned toward music after a teenage rugby injury. At eighteen he relocated to Liverpool to enroll at the Paul McCartney-founded Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where he received the national Songwriter of the Year honor from the Musicians Benevolent Fund—an accolade that soon secured his early-2012 signing to Turn First Records. That label issued the debut single “From Nowhere” in autumn 2012 and the follow-up “Compliment Your Soul” the next spring. Sweet Disarray reached the U.K. Top 30 and appeared on the Billboard Heatseekers chart in the United States. Ben H. Allen handled production for the sophomore album Emerging Adulthood, released on Communion Music in summer 2017.

In February 2018 Croll departed Liverpool for Los Angeles in pursuit of fresh creative direction. Over the ensuing year he composed material later tracked at Spacebomb Studios in Virginia alongside Matthew E. White. Several of those songs surfaced on an EP in May 2020 that included “So Dark” and “Honeymoon,” setting the stage for the full-length Grand Plan that August. A second collaboration with White, Fools, emerged in May 2023; on it Croll reflects on dislocation, homesickness, and the possibility of renewal that accompanied his move across the Atlantic.