Dreams Are Made Of

Text by Nia Engrassi.

A girl, a guitar and the painful lyricism trapped in Eurydice’s throat, words as tragic as they’re beautiful, if only for her need to sing them.

That’s the emergent artist Annabelle Dinda. 

The need to compare new artists to their bigger counterparts is not an easy one to shake. After all, we understand the world in binaries. You’ll listen to “Big News Day” and want to call it Radiohead. You’ll want to liken her to Alanis Morissette for the way she says “God,” or to Big Thief for the brutal way she says “the mind is the body, wish it wasn’t right now.”  

But not a single one of those comparisons will seem fitting. Perhaps that is why she has managed to hold onto the wave of thousands of TikTok girls in their rooms with a guitar in their hands and a dream in their voice, and slowly swim out to a place of her own – an island of 1.3 million monthly listeners.

And because indie folk recognizes indie folk, and talent usually appreciates talent, she’s now set to open for Noah Kahan’s American tour this summer. That might just take her off Dice and, instead, earn her a regular place on Ticketmaster turf. 

Originally from Wayne, Pennsylvania, Dinda has released four albums. She has a degree from New York University’s Gallatin School, where she studied storytelling through the lens of music and language, which may be why her latest songs sound like fables.

“Every time a guy writes a song, he’s a cowboy, a sailor” is the lifeline people clung to that pushed her to the surface, but to us women, Dinda’s lyrics are not our rage or our pain.

They are the tragic fact that we’ll never separate our womanhood from the self.

“I’m not quiet, I am loud and I’m new,” she sings.

How refreshing is that?