The future musician Taylor D grew up in a household of music fans, which is distinct from a household of musicians. Still, it gave her the creative nourishment she would need later in life. “I started with music at a very young age,” Taylor tells Post-Burnout. “It was in the house for years.

“Mam and Dad always had the radio on. My Mam was a big Prince fan; she loved Prince and Michael Jackson. Bon Jovi was always a big thing in the house, as well; it’d be on all the time, and I remember when I was, probably, around seven, for Christmas, I was like, ‘Can I get a Bon Jovi album?’, and my parents were like, ‘Which one?’, and I was like, ‘Slippery When Wet!’, and I had that on repeat for, probably, about two years! And Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran were huge influences on me, as a kid, growing up.”

In 2018, at the age of twelve, Taylor told her parents that she would like to learn guitar. A little reluctant due to their daughter’s proclivity towards temporary hobbies, her parents eventually relented and bought her a cheap acoustic guitar to practice on.

Taylor soon joined a six-week beginners’ guitar course, practising for up to ten hours a day, before joining the Irish Youth Music Awards programme to learn songwriting. While there, the programme’s director (who, coincidentally, happened to be Taylor’s former guitar teacher) gave her an ultimatum: “Either you write a song, or I’m kicking you out, and you’re not allowed back!”

Given free rein to write what she wanted, using “four chords and the truth,” Taylor sculpted her first song, called “Happen Again.” “Now, I look back on it, six years later, and I say, ‘Yeah, that’s never coming out! Never, ever!’” laughs Taylor, when reflecting on the song.

While she may be unhappy with her first song now, the enforced deadline proved to Taylor that she could write, which was the impetus for what came next. “After the Irish Youth Music Awards… – I joined that in about 2018/’19 – …and then continued in that programme,” recalls Taylor.

“Then I joined a summer camp, and I moved onto another guitar teacher, because I was learning how to play the electric guitar. Now, I didn’t pick it up very well, back then! But he was in this music camp where you come, and you join a band, and you write songs there.

“I ended up in a band at the time. I was the lead singer and the lead songwriter of the band. Now, being teenagers, you start off with, ‘We’re going to play Wembley next week!’, and then you play a couple of rehearsals in your shed or whatever, and then it fizzles out.

“But the guy that was running it was our drummer’s dad, and he had a recording studio. So, he was like, ‘Right, if you finish two tracks by Friday, I’ll record them all, and we’ll put them up on SoundCloud,’ and we were like, ‘Deadly! We’re going to be famous! We’ll pitch them to labels! Universal are going to sign us!’

“So, I wrote two songs for that, called ‘Every Cloud’ and ‘Phoenix,’ and put them out, and that gave me a taste for recording, and I was like, ‘Ohhh! This is a new world! I want to get into this!’”

At this point, Taylor had about twenty songs in her back pocket. While the band unceremoniously faded away (“The boys wanted to play video games, and I wanted to be a rockstar,” is Taylor’s laconic recollection), she stuck with the same producer, and recorded and released several singles between 2021 and 2023.

Initially an alt-pop solo act, featuring Taylor singing over digital beats, her music has always focused on emotionally vulnerable first-hand accounts of her life, but with a weighted maturity that allows her to acknowledge fault when she was in the wrong, but not to accept the burden when she was not.

Now, at twenty-one, Taylor looks back on these lyrics as a documentation of her youth. “I’ve grown up a lot since even the Fan Girl EP,” Taylor says of looking back on her lyrics. “That’s three years ago now, and that’s crazy to even think that that’s three years ago, because it feels like just yesterday that I released that EP! [Laughs]

“But I think, obviously, now that I’ve lived a little bit more, I know life is not as ‘cupcakes and rainbows’ as I thought it was when I was sixteen- and seventeen-years-old! You get into the real world, and you realise, ‘Oh, God! It’s a bit hard out there!’ [Laughs] But, yeah, it’s still me.”

After releasing seven singles, to prepare for her debut EP (the aforementioned Fan Girl, released in 2023), Taylor began recording her tracks at Beardfire Studios with engineer Rohan Healy. While Fan Girl continued Taylor’s alt-pop direction, her first single after its release, 2024’s “Cant say I love you,” went in a noticeably more rock direction, with emphasis put on traditional instrumentation, and this has dictated the course of her musical output since.

“It was October 2023, and it was a random Tuesday,” Taylor recalls of what made her switch genres. “My friend texted me, saying, ‘By the way, I got you two tickets to see Arctic Monkeys tonight in Dublin for your birthday, and I forgot to tell you about it!’

“We went to the gig, and I was sitting there, thinking, ‘Why am I making pop music?! I want to do this!’ And I went home, and I plugged my electric guitar into my interface on my laptop, and I wrote ‘Cant say I love you’ straight away, that night. Then I finished it off, and had it done and everything, the next day, and I texted my producers, saying, ‘Is the studio available next week? I have a new song.’

“Now, they had been at me for months on end, saying, ‘Oh, do a rock song!’, and I was like, ‘No, no, no! I’m not doing a rock song! I don’t want to do a rock song!’ And then I came in with this song, and they were like, ‘[Pulls a shocked expression] What? We’re doing rock music, now?!’, and I was like, ‘Yeah!’”

This new direction had an immediate positive response, as Taylor awoke one day to find the news that 98FM would be adding the song to their on-air playlist, which resulted in more coverage on other stations. Soon after, she saw her music charting. Beginning with her 2025 single “Born to Love You,” Taylor has had several releases chart at number one on the Irish iTunes Charts.

“That’s insane,” Taylor says of this experience. “Like, when I got the first number-one single, I was just like, ‘Ah! It’s a one-off!’ I’m looking at it, going, ‘That’s not real! That’s not real!’ And then, it sets in. You’ve got people texting you, saying, ‘Yeah, you’re number one on the charts!’, and you’re like, ‘What?! Am I?!’, and then it happens again, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God! This is crazy! That’s two in a row!’”

Also debuting at number one on the Irish iTunes Alternative Albums Chart was Taylor’s new EP, Bad Decisions. Released on her 21^st birthday, Bad Decisions is a pop-punk-and-glam-infused four-track EP that also marks Taylor’s first release with her new band, whom she began gigging with in January.

“It would’ve started in July last year,” Taylor says of the EP. “I started writing, just for the live set, because I was like, ‘I need more [rock] songs.’ Now, ‘Survive’ was a little bit longer; it was November 2024 when I wrote that song, and that debuted at my Whelan’s headliner in 2025.

“So, that one was kind of there, but I hadn’t done anything with it, because I didn’t know which way I wanted to put the song, because, obviously, it’s rock music now, and that was written as a fully acoustic track with a piano, and I was like, ‘What way can I do this?’, so I kind of left that there.

“So, I think the process really started with ‘Fake Illusion.’ I started writing that in July [2025]. I was talking to a friend of mine, and he was like, ‘You know, when I met you first […] I didn’t think you were going to be nice, because you’re Taylor D, and you’ve got these numbers on Instagram and Spotify, and I just thought you were going to be really egotistical, but you’re actually dead sound!’, and that kind of hurt a little!”  

Gradually building an EP centred around the themes of perception and truth, Bad Decisions was made with Taylor’s new band in the studio. Despite being Taylor’s first extended declaration as a “rock” artist, she was not content to limit the EP’s scope.

“I think if I were to limit myself to one genre, I’d drive myself crazy,” Taylor says. “Anytime I’m writing, I could be writing a style like YUNGBLUD, Green Day, Avril Lavigne, a bit of Ed Sheeran, all meshed into one, and then the next song could be Metallica and Black Sabbath mashed together. It depends.

“Even with this EP, I think you can see the broad spectrum of my music. None of them sounds the same. Not one of them sounds like the same genre, really, because they’re kind of different, you know? ‘Survive’ has got more poppy bits; ‘Obsession’…people have said that’s country. I’m like, ‘OK!’”

At the minute, Taylor is already writing material for her next release, but even she is not certain how they will turn out by the time they are released. What she is certain about, however, is that if you get your ass down to Sin É this Friday, you can see her and Dog Bless live for the Bad Decisions EP launch!

“It’s the EP launch, so you can hear the full EP live,” Taylor says of what people can expect on Friday. “We’ve never played ‘Obsession’ live before, so that’s going to be an exclusive for everyone there. We’re going to have some covers. A lot of high energy. Some surprises, maybe, on the night. A full, high-energy set, and, yeah, it’s just going to be an awesome night, so get down! Tickets are only €8.50. Very cheap! Cheaper than a pint in most places!”

Taylor D’s latest EP, Bad Decisions, is out now. You can keep up with Taylor through her Linktree.

This Friday (the 16^th), Taylor D will host an EP launch for Bad Decisions at Sin É, Dublin, with special guests Dog Bless. Tickets are available here.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.