Blessed with a gift for soulful, 21st-century pop melodies and armed with guitar skills that nod to past masters, Patrick Droney creates songs that feel timeless and new all at once. They’re future classics by design, full of dazzling rhythms and images built to last. His new EP, State of the Heart, builds on a powerful oeuvre, diving into-as he puts it-“the reckoning of what’s behind you, finding meaning in loss, the essence of time, and the pursuit of self.” Gilded in an ultramodern production shine, the songs were born all over the world-London, Los Angeles, and his homebase of Nashville-and realized in the midst of a year where the only constant was change.
The Pennsylvania-born artist’s love affair with music, however, is long-running and sturdy. Droney picked up a six-string before he started grade school, and received the Robert Johnson Foundation’s Next Generation Award by the tender age of 12. Since then, he’s secured cosigns from legends like James Brown, B.B. King, The Roots, and Macy Gray, become a Fender ambassador, and signed with Warner Records. After following music from sunny L.A. to Nashville, Droney dropped a self-titled debut EP in 2018, establishing himself as a master of both incendiary R&B grooves (“Stand and Deliver”) and dreamy pop songs (“High Hope”) that soar with transcendent guitar.
Clocking more than 25 million Spotify streams, that EP landed him at a sold-out Barclays Center for Tidal X and on Late Night with Seth Meyers. State of the Heart builds on these successes toward a bigger, brighter, and bolder version of Droney’s visionary sound-something powerful enough to reach across the great distances 2020 has imposed on us. The set is a culmination of sorts, with Droney gazing toward his past as he moves into the future.