Pink boxers, analogue instruments and hip-hop beats have made Dapperton a TikTok star – but he’s worked hard for it
Gus Dapperton emerged in 2017 as a lo-fi pop prankster with a lime-green bowl cut and videos that were somewhere between a Michel Gondry short and a Zooey Deschanel romcom. They showed him tap-dancing through a high school, canoodling with his then-girlfriend, Euphoria star Barbie Ferreira, and being chased by a farmer while wearing nothing but pink boxers. “People thought I was quirky and irreverent, but I was fully serious about how everything looked and sounded,” he says sincerely. “That’s just me.”
Born Brendan Rice, Dapperton was an extrovert early on, painting his nails and dyeing his hair as a kid growing up in the “conservative” farm town of Warwick, NY. At 14 he started making hip-hop beats inspired by Madlib and MF Doom and, after winning a local songwriting contest, would bunk off to work on GarageBand tracks. After cycling through aliases such as Oliver Twistless and Pablo Pistachio he settled on the more understated Gus Dapperton and switched to dreamy bedroom pop. “I’d put in 10,000 hours producing by the time I was 18,” he says with a grin.