Dan Croll didn’t grow up scribbling lyrics in a Moleskine under his duvet while listening to Kid A. He played rugby. Like, real rugby. “I wrote my first song at 17,” he says. “I still consider myself an amateur.” Welcome to the weird charm of Dan Croll—endearing self-deprecation meets quietly ambitious alt-pop.
When his debut album Sweet Disarray punched above its weight, Croll suddenly found himself staring down the barrel of The Dreaded Second Album. “The first one exceeded my expectations,” he admits. “I didn’t actually think I’d get to become a full-time musician.” Spoiler alert: he did. But the path to Emerging Adulthood wasn’t exactly a victory lap. “It was a real strain mentally and physically,” he says. “There’s no escaping the pressure of a second album.”
Instead of doubling down on the DIY aesthetic that had won him fans, Croll did what every manager warns against: he flipped the formula. “I took away all of my mates. Took away all the musicians. Just put myself in a room with really experienced people and quality instruments,” he says. The result is an album that leans harder into the pop world—brighter, slicker, maybe even a little riskier. “I get bored so easily,” he shrugs.
The album’s title wasn’t just branding. Croll was navigating the kind of quarter-life existential vertigo most of us outsource to therapy. “You’re growing up in public,” he says. “It’s terrifying.” Combine that with a growing fear of public transport, performance anxiety, and the creeping sense of being unqualified for your own job, and Emerging Adulthood starts sounding less like a coming-of-age story and more like a survival guide.
So how did he manage it all? He gave out his phone number.
No, really. “We were joking around and someone said, ‘You should just give out your phone number,’” he says. “And there was this moment where we all went, actually… yeah.” Thus, Dial Dan was born—a public hotline to Dan Croll himself, open a few days every month. “People call just to talk,” he says. “One guy was a night security guard in Scotland. We ended up talking about comedy for 45 minutes.”
It’s a move that feels both wildly naïve and oddly genius in an era of over-curated parasocial fakery. “If I’d had a direct line to someone like Dashboard Confessional when I was a teenager, I’d have lost my mind,” Croll says. “So I wanted to be that for someone else.”
So, yes, Emerging Adulthood is a bigger record. Glossier. More grown-up, even if its creator still feels like he’s winging it. But it’s also still Dan Croll: earnest, self-effacing, and just a little too emotionally available. You can literally call him about it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Bad Boy" below!
