Boulder musician Drew Hersch describes his upcoming album SUNBURNS as a glass of white wine. 

“[It] can be dangerous when you’re heartbroken,” he says. “Is it going to calm you down? Make you laugh? Make you cry?” 

Like any good intoxicant, Hersch’s sophomore LP might just do all three. It’s a genre-defying breakup album touching on the stages of grief following a romantic split. His biggest fear with the project? Being perceived as a bummer. 

That might sound surprising for an artist who titled his 2020 debut sad boy summer, a freewheeling collection of bedroom indie-pop tracks covering themes like unrequited crushes. Hersch considers the all-caps SUNBURNS a sequel to his debut album with a bigger, more experimental sound. 

The 23-year-old is the sole creative vision behind his work, directing his own music videos and doing his own cover art and marketing. Since launching the project in 2018, Hersch says the object has always been to shake things up — but that mission took on a new urgency with SUNBURNS. 

“I tend to make my arrangements theatrical, jarring and dramatic, which I played into on this album because it was inspired by a very painful breakup,” says the former theater kid. “I wanted the album to capture the intensity of that emotion.”

Processing that level of feeling on his own has come at a cost. Carrying the creative load on his shoulders means taking longer than he might like to bring his work to audiences, stretching his creative limits in the process.

“I started some of these songs in the fall of ’23, and I’m just finishing them,” Hersch says. “Doing it all myself is a commitment because of how heavy the theme was. It tested my loyalty to my art. I wanted to give up so many times and just stop writing about this.”

‘The whole spectrum of grief’

Without much of an audience to share his art with, Hersch questioned why he was drawn to a project involving his deepest pain. He sometimes wondered if it was worth locking himself into album mode for a year, especially when friends and family became tired of hearing him talk about it. 

“What am I doing this for?” Hersch asked himself throughout the process. “And why am I so inclined to make an hour and 20 minute-long project that’s about my deepest pain, when I should be just moving on?” 

Hersch’s family implored him to do just that, assuming the album was a sign he hadn’t processed his previous relationship. Although Hersch felt moved on from the relationship itself, he didn’t feel done with SUNBURNS. 

“Making songs about emotions I didn’t feel anymore was interesting,” he says. “I recorded some of the saddest songs I wrote a year ago toward the end of the process, with a total smile on my face because of how good they sounded.”

Although Hersch thinks he’s done making breakup albums for the foreseeable future, he hopes SUNBURNS will inspire listeners to put more of themselves out into the world. That’s why he provided “a song for everyone,” commenting on the distinct moods and phases that come with a romantic meltdown. 

He crafted an ode to the post-breakup promiscuous phase with club bangers “PPM” and “Harlow’s Pit of Despair.” The period of sentimental reflection is represented by the weepy twang of tracks like“Summer Again.” The anger stage of grief is personified through big drums and electric guitar in “Miss Universe” and the title track.

“I love when genres represent emotions, especially with a breakup album,” Hersch says. “You feel the whole spectrum of grief.”

‘It’s everything’

A 2023 CU Boulder graduate and current resident of the People’s Republic, the city’s surrounding landforms and seasons also inspire Hersch’s art. 

“I want some of my songs to sound like running up the creek path in the summer,” he says. “I want some of my songs to sound like driving along Canyon in the winter. It’s a beautiful place to base music around.” 

But while the end result on his latest album is embedded in heartbreak, the last thing Hersch wants at his upcoming release celebration at Trident on Dec. 6 is to elicit pity from the audience. He hopes his live performance can provide everything from reflection and catharsis to a celebratory dance party. Whatever your poison, he’s got a concoction for you. 

“It’s a very white wine album,” Hersch says. “But it’s also whiskey. It’s also tequila. It’s everything.” 

via cravethesound.com

Even in the midst of a pandemic, with no studio available to him, Drew Hersch has hardly slowed down his music production. “It's literally like, sometimes I'll be in the shower and a random word will come to be a random melody,” he says. “Like, I'll just catch myself humming a song that doesn't exist. And I'm like, ‘wait, I just made that up.’”

In fact, the indie-pop singer-songwriter and second year University of Colorado student doesn’t even view the isolation brought on by COVID-19 as a setback, but instead, as an enticing challenge. “I recorded vocals the other day just laying down on my floor. I took my mic off my stand and I was just holding it, laying on my back,” Drew explains to me over Zoom, gesturing behind to the neon-lit bedroom that he records in nowadays. “I feel like being in my room, as opposed to being in a studio, allows me to just be more comfortable.”

That work ethic has already paid off, with the first big product of his bedroom production, “sad boy summer,” being released midway through 2020 as his debut album. He’s already started work on a second one, and he promises it’s even better than the first, thanks to everything he’s learned through the process. “I love listening to my own music because I can't find it anywhere else. And that's a really, really recent realization that I've had.”

You might not have heard of Drew Hersch — he’s got about 8,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, a number that’s less of a third of the student body of his own college — but if he has anything to say about it, you’ll know his name soon. Drew has the carefree attitude and confidence of a burgeoning pop star, and why wouldn’t he?

In the last year, that’s clearly worked for him: one of his first released songs, “honey,” has amassed over half a million streams on Spotify, with the number growing by the thousands each day. Drew isn’t exactly sure what it was about the sincere pop ballad that piqued the internet’s attention. Earnestly, he ponders that it might have been the soulful, crooning lyricism (“Honey, do you love me? / Are you down to spend the nights on the road?”), or maybe the gentle piano riffs that, looking back, he insists sound a bit too much like Rex Orange County than he meant for. But maybe he isn’t giving himself enough credit. Whatever the X factor was, Drew knows that “honey” was just the beginning of something exciting.

“I didn't know what mastering was at the time. I just was like, ‘oh, I'm going to put it on this website that’ll make it louder,’” he explains, “The production was, technically, really bad, but people just loved it.”

Drew insists that while he was blindsided by the experience, he remains grateful for it. “That was the most DIY, unexpected blow-up that I could have ever imagined,” he says. So instead of sitting on his laurels, the 19-year-old musician has spent most of the pandemic era doubled down on music production with his home setup, seeking a more refined, robust sound to entertain his growing audience.

Unsurprisingly, the sound of Drew Hersch is firmly rooted in the music that soundtracked his mid-to-late 2010s teen years. When I ask what artists he looks up to most, he answers without skipping a beat: “It's always been Billie, Rex Orange County and Lana Del Rey. No one else’s ever entered the top three.” The music Drew makes unmistakably draws a page from his idols, as it wanes between the nostalgic, downbeat ballads reminiscent of Lana or Rex, and the breezier acoustic pop tracks that sound more like Dominic Fike. Those tonal shifts exist both lyrically and sonically on his debut album, a musical whiplash that Drew considers to be a signature part of his repertoire, and something that he owes to Billie.

“When I first started music I had a whole folder of unreleased stuff that just sounds like wannabe Rex, wannabe Billy,” he says. “I remember seeing her at a really small show and she was the first artist I saw who could go absolutely hard, and then do a cry song.”

“Like if there's a dramatic part, it's going to go silent after, and then it's going to come back in with a giant drum, stuff like that,” he explains as if he’s mapping out his next song on the spot. “I feel like this was really based on doing theater for 10 years. Lyrically, I like pulling ‘sike’ moments in my music, like, being really sad, and then the opposite. I think at this point I've combined them in a way that takes inspiration, but also is unapologetically original.”

Drew has always been drawn to creative expression on a big stage, though it took him a while to figure out what medium to embrace. As a kid, he loved being onstage for his school’s theater performances, while discovering the joys of video and photography work in art courses. He even dabbled in music once in a while, though that wasn’t quite his calling at the time and it caused him to sour at songwriting classes (I'm such a stickler against form sometimes,” he admits).

After spending those grade school years at a tiny boarding school nestled in the Southern California foothills, Drew can’t exactly put his finger on what brought him to CU, but he knows the move to Colorado was the right move for him and his music.

“My dad actually went to CU. I don't like to say that that's the reason, but he put it on the radar,” he explains. “He was like, ‘I'm telling you, it’s the perfect balance of everything.’ Like it's artsy, it's fun. There are people that are focused, but who also want to have a good time.”

Maybe the work-hard-play-hard environment of Boulder, where Drew began studying in the fall of 2019 as his music took off, is to blame for his ambitious, eclectic DIY attitude.

“My major is media production, so that's helped a lot to just sort of have an eye and an ear for all parts of it. I design my own album covers. I'm writing a few music videos right now. I record and I write and I promote everything,” Drew says, “I've never not done stuff on my own.”

That creative skillset: graphic design, video production and even some savvy social media marketing, has all played into his main hustle, his music. But for Drew, everything is drawn towards that art form because it’s the biggest, loudest way to broadcast his thoughts to the world.

For the college sophomore, his music often fittingly finds itself grappling with the time-old theme of coming-of-age, such as the past year, which played stage for the turning point in how Drew defined his own sexuality. Instead of becoming mired in existential dread or despair, Drew sees the twists and turns of late adolescence to be another creative muse for his adaptable artistry. “It’s been something funny to look back on,” he even contends.

“Hearing songs that I wrote obsessing about girls, that I was actually just obsessed over and not actually feeling anything for, is so funny to look back on. A lot of this album is ironically making fun of myself for being that dumb, because I wrote so many songs when I was struggling with [my sexuality],” he says. “So recording them, all of my frustration with myself is coming through. It's blowing up into something magic and I love it.”

However despite the inspiring undertones of self-discovery, he insists his new album isn’t looking to preach anything in particular. “I don't think there's any message that I'm necessarily trying to push in my lyrics. I think just doing what I want artistically is my main thing,” he says. “I want people to hear my music and think you could break those boundaries and be fine.”

Whatever he does choose to talk about, though, he knows that it’s meant to be big. Even over the bounds of a Zoom video chat, you can see the gears turning wildly in Drew’s head as he plans out the next big thing in his blossoming career.

“With the expansion of my sound, how it's all becoming bigger and more theatrical, I just see myself on stage more than I really ever have. It’s not being able to perform the songs that you feel are the most performable. That's been crazy hard for me,” Drew says. He also tells me excitedly about the “violins and giant drums” that are set to appear on the next album, a dramatic departure from the more indie-focused music he’s made that features modest piano and drum beats. “I also downloaded Han Zimmer plugins, so that happened,” he jokes. “I'm pushing the boundary and going, like, a 10, instead of a seven. I think that I'm finally finding where I was meant to go.”

Another cog in his creative wheelhouse? “Synesthesia,” Drew says. “It's this bizarre combination of senses. So I could hear a song, and I immediately could have a color in mind for it. thinking about performing on stage, every single song has a color. So if it's not that color on stage, my brain’s gonna freak out. It's like an aesthetic OCD. It's been awesome for my creative process.”

While he might have his future performances meticulously planned out, Drew gives off the impression that he stays more in the moment, rather than waiting for music venues and life as a whole to return to normal. He has dreams of performing at big venues throughout his career, but he’s more focused on building up a catalogue of music to perform first. “Honestly, anything in front of an audience would be awesome at this point,” he tells me.

So, what’s next for Drew? For an artist seeking stardom, one might think he’d walk the usual line of getting a big break, relinquishing control to a major label and let them handle the reigns while compromising creative integrity, a tale as old as time. But Drew doesn’t see himself as just another wannabe pop artist. He plans on pushing through with his studies and then doing it all himself. “A team would be awesome,” he says, “but to get there, I should be prioritizing and building my skills instead of paying thousands that I don’t have to do it right off the bat. I'm working on perfecting the craft.”

Drew admits that it’s hard to temper expectations for himself — he’s still a college student navigating the Zoom world, after all — but he doesn’t plan on taking things slow with his music. “It's just built my confidence that if I keep working, I could do something.”

Fresh off the heels of “honey,” the overnight success that took him by surprise, Drew Hersch has just begun his transition to paving his own road to success, and it seems like he’s inching ever closer to the driver’s seat.

“There was so long where I felt like I was blending in with other artists and taking too much inspiration from certain places,” he says. “But now, I see the industry and I feel like there's an empty parking spot for me.”

Profile: Ben Berman