“Music was always what I was interested in doing.”

Dhruv

As an undergraduate at Yale, he pivoted from statistics to songwriting. With his debut album, Private Blizzard, the young pop star is testing a more ambitious sound

By Clara Molot

In 2019, when Dhruv Sharma was a junior at Yale University majoring in data science and statistics, he recorded “Double Take,” a lo-fi, mellow R&B song. For the next two years, it was viral in Southeast Asia. The go-to soundtrack for K-pop video edits on YouTube and TikTok, the song rose to No. 1 on the charts in Thailand and the Philippines and, in 2021, was among the five most streamed songs in Malaysia and Singapore.

Record labels quickly reached out, and he signed with RCA, which represents singers such as Justin Timberlake and A$AP Rocky, in October of that year. “The stats thing was me trying to be a stable, good Indian boy,” says the 25-year-old. “But music was always what I was interested in doing.”