I’ve been following dodie for nearly a decade now (woah), and her song “Special Girl” was the very first song I ever played on my show for WQAQ, Grifter’s Bone. As a longtime fan and self-appointed dodie expert, I’ve collected everything you should know about her before listening to her upcoming album.
On Friday, October 3, she’s set to release her second studio album, “Not For Lack Of Trying.” Before we hear all of the new music, let’s take a look at dodie’s beginnings and how she got here.
Dodie, the 30-year-old British singer-songwriter, began posting her music online under the moniker ‘doddleoddle’ in 2011. Her first-ever video was an original song called “Rain,” and in the following years, she began posting covers and original music that gained traction.
In her earliest videos, she played piano, guitar, and ukulele while singing, and collaborated with dozens of other musicians and content creators, including Bry, Tessa Violet, Hazel Hayes, Orla Gartland, and Lauren Aquilina. Shortly after beginning to share music on YouTube, dodie created a second account for non-music content called “doddlevloggle,” which she still updates every few months with more personal content.
Her most popular song to date, “She,” was posted for the very first time in 2014, but wouldn’t be released formally until 2019. She shared a mix of covers and original songs over the first five years and released her first official single in 2016.
“Sick of Losing Soulmates” was released on October 14, 2016, and has collected over 100 million streams to date. This was around when I first was introduced to dodie, and the first appearance of this song on her YouTube is in an acoustic version posted that November.
That same month, she released the “Intertwined” EP, featuring six original songs and running only 14 minutes in total. Four of the tracks are full-length songs, and two are shorter tracks under one minute— the comedic song “I Have A Hole In My Tooth (And My Dentist is Shut)” and the interlude, “Life Lesson.”
The “Intertwined” EP is largely acoustic, largely featuring her three main instruments and layered harmonies. I’d definitely recommend listening to this short EP if you haven’t already, and I still listen to her first songs pretty frequently.
This EP also includes her song “When,” released as a live version, which was later recorded as a fully-produced track on her 2021 album. The song covers her experiences with derealization and feeling distanced from the present moment, and has haunted my saddest playlists since its release.
She also created music videos for “Intertwined” and “Sick of Losing Soulmates” that were posted on her official VEVO YouTube account. “Intertwined” reached charts in the US and UK, hitting No. 153 on the US Billboard Top 200 and No. 35 on the UK OCC, and debuted at No. 6 on the UK iTunes charts. Dodie went on a short, seven-show tour for “Intertwined” in various locations across the UK, but didn’t tour for the EP beyond that.
Between 2016 and 2017, she collaborated with a number of other major artists, including Tom Rosenthal, Jon Cozart, Sarah Close, Thomas Sanders, and reappearances from Orla Gartland and Tessa Violet. This is around when most people were introduced to her, and her “Coming Out Song” (posted in a sponsorship with Skittles) gained popularity online.
She continued to post a blend of covers and original tracks, including the first songs off of her 2017 EP, as well as more personal content on her second channel. In between her first and second EPs, she began talking about her mental health openly on social media, which is the beginning of her advocacy and online opinion leadership on mental health.
To this day, she is often open about her mental wellness through the different phases in her life, but she now holds a bit more distance between her personal life and social media. Dodie was a part of the first generation to broadcast their life so publicly on social media platforms following the creation of YouTube, and she’s spoken at length about the self-esteem issues and parasocial effects that the platform caused.
Dodie’s second EP, “You,” was released on August 11, 2017, and is only slightly longer than her first. It’s a bit sadder in themes, but includes tracks like “In The Middle,” “You,” and “Would You Be So Kind.” “You” debuted at No. 6 on the UK albums chart and No. 55 on the US Billboard Top 200.
This EP may have helped to solidify her reputation as a ‘ukulele girl,’ but the instrumentation and production of these tracks show significant growth from her first EP. She created three music videos for this EP, as well as a lyric video, and her storytelling shines through in these videos.
Dodie toured the EP across the UK over the course of that fall before embarking on her first 14-show tour across the US in September of 2018 to promote the EP. In the fall of 2017, she also released a book titled “Secrets For The Mad: Obsessions, Confessions and Life Lessons,” which discusses mental health, body image, online content, and all sorts of other personal topics in a collection of poems and prose.
I feel that this EP shows a lot of growth in musicality, and showcases a diverse range of emotions, from “6/10”’s sad longing, to the upbeat, bouncy “In The Middle,” and the lovestruck “Would You Be So Kind.”
Shortly following “You,” dodie shared a cover video with Flashback (an a cappella group featuring James Charles), appeared on several movie premiere red carpets, and even interviewed Anna Kendrick in promotion for Trolls. She continued posting a variety of content online before announcing her next release, “Human.”
The title track for her third release was published on September 21, 2018, featuring Tom Walker, alongside a music video directed by Hazel Hayes. The second single, “If I’m Being Honest,” was released in November, which was accompanied by a music video and a VEVO live session featuring a full orchestra.
The full “Human” EP was released on January 18, 2019, and ran seven tracks and 23 minutes in total. In addition to the two singles, the EP included “Monster” (which gained popularity on TikTok circa late 2019-early 2020), “Not What I Meant (featuring Lewis Watson),” and the full recording of “She.”
In promotion of “Human,” dodie toured across Europe and North America, which is where I first saw her live (in Boston with Adam Melchor as an opener). “Human” reached No. 82 on the US Billboard Top 200 and No. 5 on the UK OCC charts.
The opening track off “Human” is titled “Arms Unfolding” and runs only 1:35, but it became a part of a much larger and longer project. Dodie secretly hid the lyrics of “Arms Unfolding,” appropriate pitch and all, across videos she’d released over nine months before the song’s release, scrapbooking together into the full song. The song is written about her up and down relationships with being a content creator as well as a musician, and I think it was the perfect project to fit that theme.
On October 19, 2020, dodie announced the release of her first full-length studio album, “Build A Problem,” through a series of YouTube videos posted over the course of several weeks. The album was originally slated for release on March 5, 2021, but was rescheduled due to distribution issues caused by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first official single for the album was released in October, but two prior singles were included in the album: “Boys Like You,” released in September of 2019, and “Guiltless,” released in May of 2019, and both included music videos. “Cool Girl” was released in October of 2019 in conjunction with the album’s announcement, along with my favorite music video dodie’s created to date.
Following “Cool Girl,” dodie released “Rainbow” in December of 2020, the full production of an original song previously released on YouTube, a song dictating the ostracization that comes with being queer online. “Hate Myself” was released as the third single in January of 2021, followed by “I Kissed Someone (It Wasn’t You) in April as the fourth single.
The full album came out on May 7, 2021, and included a pretty big surprise: because of the release delays, dodie included a full suite of demos in the album, eight additional songs released as a second disc. Excluding the demos, “Build A Problem” included 14 songs and ran 31 minutes.
In typical dodie fashion, the album included not one but two interludes (“?” and “.”), and the album was accompanied by a full video project. Each of the newly released songs was turned into a music video directed by Jack Howard, with each following a variety of creative paths that all tied back to the album’s themes.
This album also includes the final release of “When,” in a much more mature, somber tone, and hearing the second release five years after I heard it the first time was definitely a gut punch. The album was dodie’s third top-ten release on the UK OCC charts at No. 3 and reached No. 115 on the US Billboard Top 200. In 2022, dodie toured the album across the UK and North America, where I saw her for a second time (also in Boston, with Lizzy McAlpine as the opener).
Following “Build A Problem,” dodie released the four-track “Hot Mess” EP in September of 2022. The EP was accompanied by a live film published online, running through each track consecutively in release order.
Apart from her album and EPs, dodie has released quite a few single songs and been featured on a number of songs by other artists, as well as her role in the band FIZZ. You can read more about my thoughts on the FIZZ album in an article for WQAQ, but the group’s 12-track album “The Secret To Life” was released in October 2023 and is a beautiful example of art coming from love, friendship, and artistic collaboration.
She released two singles in 2024, one for the video game Life Is Strange and a cover of “Old Devil Moon” as a part of Chet Baker’s “Reimagined” project. She’s also been featured on a growing number of tracks, including “Mine – Stripped” from Orla Gartland’s latest album, “Here Comes The Sun” with Jacob Collier in 2019, “Call Me Wild” with Cory Wong in 2023, “I Eat Boys” with Chloe Moriondo in 2022, and many more.
Now, in 2025, we’ve entered the “Not For Lack Of Trying” era. As her second studio album, the project runs 12 songs and about 40 minutes, with three singles released so far. “I’M FINE!” was released in June and feels almost like a more grown-up version of tracks like “6/10” or “Cool Girl.”
The second single, “I Feel Bad For You, Dave,” is a bossa nova-inspired track that lines up with the likes of Laufey or Clairo. The track is a cheeky play on a love story, with characters like @dave079 and @_iamkate_.
While sometimes I feel like songs with social media references can date themselves in an off-putting way, “I Feel Bad For You, Dave” does so within a fresh musical blend, making it feel much more timeless. Both of these first singles include music videos, and the video for “I Feel Bad For You, Dave” includes a cameo by Jeff Goldblum, personal friend of dodie and fellow signee of dodie’s label.
The third single for the project is a love song to dodie’s cat, Mrs., and features her flatmate and FIZZ bandmate, Greta Isaac. “Darling, Angel, Baby” is sonically different from the other singles, which gives me hope for an exciting variety in “Not For Lack Of Trying.”
The album is slated for release on October 3 and was produced with Joe Rubel (Maisie Peters, Griff, Sigrid). Dodie has spoken about the album frequently on social media since its announcement, and has shared quick snips of other tracks alongside brief descriptions of each. When discussing the project, she said, “I think I’ve finally learned now that the way I write is just very different. I just need to have so much more patience with myself — it just takes the time that it takes.”
Now, ahead of the album’s release, I hope you feel much more informed on dodie’s career to date and are almost as excited to hear the new album as I am. Keep an eye on wqaq.com to see my thoughts on the album post-release, and tune in to Grifter’s Bone on Friday, October 3 at 11 A.M. EST to hear my immediate thoughts!
