While growing up in Croatia, there was never any doubt about what the future musician and promoter, Daria, would do. “My whole family is full of musicians,” she tells Post-Burnout. “Everyone supports music. Some don’t support it as a full-time thing, but, you know, everyone supports music. Everyone in my family has, at one point, attended a music school; my dad’s and mam’s side.

“My mam and my grandpa on her side – rest in peace – both have degrees in Music, as well. So, I wouldn’t say that it’s continuing a tradition, because, otherwise, I’d be stuck in a music school, right now,  but it’s that passion that I’ve been kind of given to at a young age, and I just kind of kept it going, in a way.”

“We’re all classically trained. We’re all very much [like], ‘Oh, my God! What’s your favourite opus from this composer?’ instead of, like, Taylor Swift songs. [Laughs]. I attended a lot of concerts. I was a part of many choirs, growing up, as well.

“My whole music school is based on classical music. So, I know probably more than I should about classical music [Laughs] for what I want to do! But, yeah, the music behind it is more so going to the roots, whereas, over here… – because I’m not Irish – …over here, in Ireland, I learnt so much about modern music, about 20^th century music. Whereas, back there, I was like, ‘Oh, my God! 15^th-century classicals?! [Gives thumbs up] Hell yeah!’”

In 2021, Daria moved to Dublin to attend BIMM, which she found to be a great place to make connections and train her voice. “I’ve got a lot of advice from vocal tutors, so far,” she says. “Because, before BIMM – even though I am classically trained, even though I have a lot of education in music, already – before BIMM, I never went to a single singing class.

“So, I actually didn’t know any technicality about vocal anatomy, about vocal technique, about different styles; I was just kind of singing at home. I would say that I’ve got a lot of very useful advice and I was taught a lot by our vocal tutors.”

BIMM also gave Daria the confidence to start her own musical project. “I also started playing more, I guess, because of BIMM,” she explains. “Because, in the music school, I was forced to practice, but, here, I’m encouraged to, and that’s a big difference when you go from a classical teacher who goes, ‘Practice, practice, practice! Do that three more times! That’s not good enough! You need to curl your fingers! You need to do this! You need to do that!’

“And then, here, they’re just like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re doing this next week. Prepare this, try to look out for this, try to look out for that.’ They don’t go, ‘You need to be ready next week!’ There’s been a lot of things that we did in college that I, genuinely, couldn’t do. Partially because of will, partially because we’d cover a song that I, genuinely, couldn’t listen to because it was triggering – the sounds of it were triggering – and the tutors would be like, ‘Yeah, that’s OK. You can sit outside, put earplugs in, whatever.’”

Daria, in wanting to start a solo project mainly due to the logistical issues of who gets ownership of a songbook if a band breaks up, would form her own venture called DARIA. The difference between DARIA in all-caps and Daria in letter case is that the former is primarily a stage persona that the latter uses to overcome some elements of shyness.

“I do have a stage persona,” Daria admits. “Her name is DARIA, all-caps. You’re now talking to Daria – D, capital, everything else lowercase – but when I’m on the stage, I clock out of my usual personality and I enter, ‘This is it; you’re on stage.’

“I developed that throughout the four years at BIMM, but that’s also when I started performing in this kind of way, and not in a choir or whatever. She exists because, if you put me on a stage, the performance anxiety would take over and I would just squat down and look at the floor, and shake. That’s me.

“I, basically, could not perform without a stage persona, and the way I developed her was through experimentation. I did a lot of experimenting throughout, not this summer, but the summer of 2023, because it was a rough area, that June, July, and August.

“I did a lot of experimenting through my performing with my expression through my songs, and she kind of started existing…she was born! I usually do a small, little pre-show ritual to kind of just enter into that mindset.

“I just enter a stage persona. She takes over. A lot of the times, I don’t even remember what I did on stage because I genuinely let her take over. I wouldn’t say it’s a split personality, but, at this point, she may as well be. She deserves to be her own person.”

DARIA is now comprised of members that Daria met during her time at BIMM. Despite technically qualifying as “session musicians,” Daria doesn’t view them that way; stating that they are “My band” and that she would be heartbroken if any of them left.

As an introvert, the DARIA project is a vehicle for Daria to express sincere emotions in a vulnerable way. “The reasons and the way that I write my music is putting my emotions and my expressions onto a piece of paper and onto lyrics, and putting those lyrics into a melody,” Daria says.

“That’s the passionate side of it. The reason I started writing songs was to let go of something that I was holding in, you know? Because you sometimes can’t say that to a person, so you’re just like, ‘I’m just going to write a song about it. They’re going to think it’s a pretty song. They’re not going to know it’s about them.’

“I made it very clear to my band that this is the way I write music, and they will never try to intervene with that, because they know that if they try to change a lyric, how is that going to be me expressing myself? They’re more so supportive of the instrument side of it because [Laughs] I’m very bad at communication!

“I don’t know any ‘drummer language,’ quote-unquote, because I never learnt about drums before I came to BIMM, and, even when I did come to BIMM, I didn’t really learn much about drums, because I was in the vocal stream, you know? So, I come to rehearsal, give them a demo, and I go, ‘I want this part, or this section, to sound like this song, or sound really heavy, or sound like a rock ballad,’ or, you know, that kind of thing. So, they really help out with the arrangement, more so, because I, genuinely, don’t know how to precisely explain it to them.”

When we asked Daria if she felt comfortable being candid in her lyrics, she responded, “I feel like a lot of people I know don’t actually understand my lyrics as much as some stranger would, because they don’t get any context into why or how I wrote the song, and I feel that opens up a lot more doors about their own perception and relation to the song.

“I am introverted when it comes to being in person, but when it comes to music, I want to be as emotionally vulnerable as I possibly can, because that’s the way that I express myself; that’s the only way that I can express myself fully.

“A lot of people – for example, my family, my close friends, my ex-friends or partners – you know, they don’t quite understand the situation, fully, because they have some sort of context in their head. For them, it might not be the picture that I’m trying to put on the wall; to them, it’s going to be this little piece in the corner, you know?”

Despite the project being quite nascent, the music of DARIA is changing along with Daria’s own musical interests. She explains, “I call it a smoothie. I wouldn’t say that I fit into a genre. When people say, ‘What kind of music do you play?’, I say, ‘I don’t know!’ [Laughs]

“As I shift through people that I listen to, they become my influences, more and more. I was in a phase of listening to a lot of soul artists, a lot of Aretha Franklin, that kind of…I’m not going to say ‘That kind of jazz’; that kind of soul, you know!

“Then I went through a very big era of just nostalgia with classical music. I literally had a stage where I’d put Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in my AirPods and just walk around town, and I’d be like, ‘This is a masterpiece!’ And it is a masterpiece, but, looking back, I don’t know why I did it, you know?

“Right now, I’m in a huge metal phase. For almost a year now, I’ve been, daily, listening to metal and only metal music. I don’t play anything else on my phone. I listen to other music; not on my phone. [Laughs]

“I’m a huge fan of Bad Omens, of Sleep Toke…Sleep Token are currently my absolute favourite! If II from Sleep Token walked into that room right now, I’d close this laptop and just walk away! […] Sleep Token, Bad Omens, Bring Me the Horizon. There’s an old-school metal band with a singer from Croatia, also, called Jelusick. I’m a huge fan of them!”

While this metal influence is certainly seeing its way into DARIA’s music, listeners may not hear it on the project’s debut single, “Silhouettes,” which was released last month. When asked why she chose it as the band’s debut, Daria responds, “I was preparing a story for that, but that story is 90% not true, so I’m going to be completely honest with you.

“BIMM, last year – last academic year – had these open recording sessions, where recording students from the diploma course would come into the studio that we have in the building, and there’d be a professional recording engineer there, as well. You could book in a session, they learn, and you get a song recorded.

“So, I was like, ‘Lads, do you want to record “Silhouettes”? Cool.’ Why ‘Silhouettes’? Because it’s the shortest song on the whole set; it’s under three minutes. So, I just kind of thought to myself, ‘We know this song. It’s easy, it’s short, it’s catchy. We can release it,’ you know? So, it was the first song that got recorded properly.

“I did think about it when I was planning to release it. I was like, ‘Is this really what I want to release as my first single?’ Then I thought, ‘Yes, I do, but, also, no, because I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m a rock blues artist,’ because that song is very bluesy with hard drums.

“But, then again, if people are arsed enough to actually look at the lyrics, I do want this to be my first song because I’m asserting who I am and what my music actually sounds like – ‘music’ being lyrics. It’s that very girl power, ‘I’m strong, you can’t touch me,’ that kind of thing.

“That release kind of forced me to, in a way, present myself immediately. Because I thought to myself, ‘Oh, I’m just going to ease myself into the industry, one single after another, then, eventually…’ blah, blah, blah. But this song was like, ‘No! You are this person, period! No one can tell you any different! Have you heard the lyrics? There’s no other way to see me, now!’ So, yeah, [Laughs] stream ‘Silhouettes!’”

DARIA’S debut single, “Silhouettes,” is available on all streaming platforms now. You can keep up with DARIA’s music and social media accounts through Linktree.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 22:00 (IST) where we go into further detail about everything discussed, as well as Daria’s first gigs in Ireland, moving during the COVID-19 pandemic, her work as a promoter and how she got into that field, details on her other songs, and much more. 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.