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Photo: Nick Walker

“There's only so many heads that can rest on this shoulder, but I think yours was the best for me to cry over.”

After releasing two singles exactly one month ago, the king of DIY artistry, otherwise known as d4vd, has returned with a third, “My House Is Not A Home.” Before I write anything else about it, I must preface, it will make you shed a tear. 

“My House Is Not A Home” is a soundtrack to spring showers. It’s one of those songs you listen to while driving at midnight, completely and utterly in your feels, and suddenly it starts pouring rain, you’re going 60 in a 45, screaming and crying along to the lyrics, you’re shivering, you pull over as you realize you are almost out of gas, you realize they never gave you your favorite sweater back—and they also never deleted Hinge—and maybe they never loved you at all. The only number you know to call when your car breaks down at in the middle of the night is… theirs.  

While d4vd himself coins “My House Is Not A Home” as “situationship core,” what I am hearing is an honest, melancholic reflection of a relationship hanging on by a thread, a moment where suddenly, someone no longer feels like “home” to you. In your gut, you know you have to sever the ties, but knowing this only makes it harder to do. At just over four minutes long, “My House Is Not A Home” is not the ballad we wanted but the ballad we needed. From d4vd singing almost entirely in falsetto to the whirlwind of synthesizers, you can’t help but feel the intensity of the emotions that went into creating this song. Instead of choosing to fix someone, d4vd is choosing himself, and the production of the track mirrors the leadup to the decision—slowly and quietly, and suddenly, all at once. 

“My House Is Not A Home'' demonstrates d4vd’s ability to tell a story so uniquely personal yet so widely universal. When it comes to the human experience of love and loss, he writes with such a level of vulnerability that the listener is bound to find a piece of themselves with, regardless of whether or not they are entangled in a romantic relationship or situationship. Each and every lyric feels intentional, particularly in the chorus, where d4vd hits his highest register to sing, “But you never really cared about the way that everything turned out / You didn’t wanna fall in love, you’re looking out for yourself now.” Ouch. 

In a world of two-minute, sped-up songs, d4vd is here to remind us of the power of slowing things down, with perhaps his most fully realized piece of work yet. 

Watch the "My House Is Not A Home" video below: