Daisy the Great

As Daisy the Great, Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker make folk-inflected indie rock that spans a multitude of moods—capable of being clever, devastating, or both simultaneously, spanning harmony-laden folk pop to powerhouse indie rock balladry—and has attracted quite the following as a result. With a new single, “Record Player” featuring pop-rock outfit AJR, and a new album on the way, Daisy the Great only stand to grow their audience with their intricate and impossible to resist music.

Kelley and Mina met as acting majors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and eventually bonded during a sketch comedy class where they first connected over their mutual passion for music: “We’d both written music on our own in the past, and we ended up writing this silly song together in that class that clued us into the idea that we might want to collaborate on other projects together as well,” Kelley remembers.

After graduating, the pair started writing a musical together about a band. “We got together nearly every day to work on it, and eventually we finished the script and moved on to writing music. When we started to share some songs that we had written individually in the past and rearranged them for the two of us, we immediately felt like we were on to something really special. We’d dreamed up this fictional version of ourselves in a band together and realized that we could just make it happen in real life.”