Derek Pope

Derek Pope has travelled both the long and short road. Growing up in Oakland, Derek learned to produce beats in high school, spending his nights and weekends crafting the early roots of a sound he couldn't define yet for years. After moving to Los Angeles, it wasn't until 2015 that Pope experimented with singing, and after a few demos proved that he would be creating his own lane. Pope turned those demos into his debut EP, Sunken City Redux, taking off with the hit singles "Raincoats" and "Serena Williams". That evolution continued with his self-analyzing follow-up EP The Introverted Socialite, before Pope found solid ground on We're All Strangers, and finally cemented his status as a genre-breaking artist with songs like "Us and Them" and "Some Other Way" from the album Epochs. His 2021 album Miracle Mile reflected on being quarantined and forced into a world of his own, and after moving to Colorado for a few years, Pope proved he had mastered his own sound with songs like "Awake" off his album For I Have Sinned. After switching worlds to create the alt-psych A Quiet Mind, Pope moved back to California, merging his new soundscapes with his old to create PHANTOM, a fiercely introspective album dealing with love, death, and what comes after both. Now, having gone full circle, Pope finds himself less of an artist and more of a vessel as he pushes further into the unknown, writing melodies of his own abyss.