If you’ve got a record player made in 2014, dyed your hair a seasick sort of green or like vintage dresses when they fall just below your knees, chances are you’d be a fan of Daisy the Great. 

The indie-pop duo blew up on TikTok in early 2021 when their song “The Record Player Song” inspired a viral singing challenge, but they’ve been making music together since 2016. 

Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker met at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2012. While they began their creative journey as actors, they gravitated toward music as a creative outlet and an escape from the rigidity of a traditional acting school structure.

“When you’re studying something, it can kind of ruin it for you sometimes, or you get trapped in a lot of unspoken or spoken rules with school, where they’re like ‘You have to do it this way,’” Walker said.

Born from this need for creative freedom, Walker and Dugan formed Daisy the Great and in 2018, they released their first EP, “I’ve Got a Few Friends & I Wish They Were Mine.” Walker said their songwriting process is deeply rooted in personal experience.

“It’s really interesting because sometimes we’ll write the same song but it will have drastically different meanings [for both of us],” Walker said. “Which is how it is for an audience too. … When you give it to an audience, it just becomes theirs to make it their own and interpret it in their own ways.”

Walker said the duo is inspired by artists who have a unique style and full control of their creative vision, such as David Bowie and Fiona Apple. 

“Just like the people that you can’t copy because they’re only who they are,” Walker said. “And I think that that’s kind of what we want to be, is just not really comparable to anything but its own kind of little weird thing.”

The band released their second album “All You Need Is Time” in 2022, after beginning the songwriting process over the COVID-19 pandemic. The two singers exchanged FaceTime calls and voice memos, which would eventually turn into both their 2020 EP “Soft Songs” and their sophomore album.

Walker said they built the album around two songs, “Glitter” and “Time Machine.”

“I think the way that me and Kel work a lot of times is micro to macro,” Walker said. “Especially for this album, it was very much like each individual song was its own song and wasn’t serving the purpose of an album. So it was a puzzle to put the songs in an order so that they did make sense on a macro level and also that they could stand on their own.”

Dugan said during the pandemic, she would send voice recordings to experiment with lyrics to the group’s producer, Torna, and some of these vocals ended up being on the final cut of the album.

“I recorded it on my phone and I sent it to [Torna], and I said ‘This cannot be the final because I’m literally watching TV, like my dog is walking around and I’m watching TV,’” Dugan said. “And then I was like ‘OK, well, it is what it is.’ I think it was out by the time I was like, ‘Wait, we never changed that.’” 

Daisy the Great is currently opening for The Happy Fits on their 2022 “Under Shades of Green” Tour, and have begun releasing dates for their 2022 headline tour. According to Walker, the duo’s favorite aspect of performing live is the opportunity to experiment with their music. 

“I love finding new ways to express the song,” Walker said. “I think Kel and I love figuring out exciting live endings to a song. It’s nice because you can bring something that feels like it’s gotten stale for you, you can be like, ‘OK, this feels like I’m not feeling the song. What can we do in the live performance to make it impactful?’… It’s such a reminder that music is a living, breathing thing.”

Dugan said she likes to spontaneously adjust how she performs based on the energy of the venue and the crowd. 

“It’s really interesting to be able to have a live take essentially,” Dugan said. “You’re weaving your way through expressing the music in one go and it’ll never be that way again.”

Daisy the Great will take this spontaneous energy to the stage at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro when they open for The Happy Fits on Dec. 13 at 7 p.m. More information and ticket prices can be found here.