Gus Dapperton: 4 Dear Life Tour w/ Special Guests @ HI-FI Indy
General admission, limited seating
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“Show me the escape,” Gus Dapperton sings at the start of his new album 4 Dear Life, “You know that there’s a place that we can go.” His voice is processed, scrunched up — even if he hadn’t sung the word escape, his tone alone would suggest the need for release. All the music drops out as he names his desire: “Take me out to the disco.” And then, sounding like a primal howl from the most beautiful, dirty Lower East Side dive bar in existence, the guitar comes in.
Since time immemorial, in historic moments of change and extremity, human beings have
looked to dance for relief. For skin-on-skin intimacy. For liberating anonymity and community. Take a look around: The news headlines, the video clips on social media feeds, the soundbites from politicians and executives — they are not painting a rosy picture. “Hell is in disguise as real life,” is Gus’ poetic spin on the waking nightmare of 2026 and, as ever, one available point of egress is heating up after midnight. Take me out to the disco. Welcome to the club.
At 29 years old, Gus has moved from EPs to albums and back again; he’s had his moments of
TikTok virality; he’s modeled for a luxury fashion house; he’s done the major label thing; and
more recently he stepped outside of music to write and direct a feature film. All this experience led him to a kind of creative crossroads. An independent artist for the first time in years, at the close of his twenties, he felt like he needed a clean slate to find his musical practice again.
“I wanted to come back to music and find it the same way that I did when I started making it for the first time in high school,” he says. The very act of crafting dance music was a creative reset that “allowed me to create in a really effortless and natural way.” It also felt right, not just for this terrifying, confusing moment in world history, but also for Gus’ reality right now.
As a New York resident immersed in the city’s nightlife, DJing and dancing, he’s been sweating out all the troubles of the day, as a wise man once put it. After ping-ponging between clubs and bars in Manhattan and Brooklyn like he was the J train, he birthed 4 Dear Life — the exuberant, surprising, and vulnerable (this is a Gus Dapperton record, after all) result of life lately.
“This album is so precious to me because it’s really inspired by my life in New York,” he says,
“Settling into my apartment, creating a great space to work in, forming routines to be healthier.” He’s got a high-achieving girlfriend who is working on her PhD, a fact which comes up on the LP, and he’s rubbing shoulders with lots of smart, dedicated individuals — including his sister, a close collaborator and confidant from the beginning, who is now attending law school — and yet everyone is feeling the weight of the current moment. “I’m part of a community,” he says, and despite it all “we have hope.” 4 Dear Life is that hope articulated in all its anxiety and joy.
“Take Me to the Disco” acts as opening credits, an unusually structured intro that brings in the big ideas and disparate sounds of the album before taking off with “Sweet Tooth,” a high-energy dance-pop song that immediately dispels any doubt that Gus will ace the assignment. For past projects, he often wrote on acoustic guitar, but many of 4 Dear Life’s songs entered the world as beats — a particular tempo and swing. It’s an LP guided by lizard-brain instinct and if the drums sound right, everything proceeds from there. Picture it: You’re in the club and the DJ blends into a rhythm that pulls you from the bar to the dance floor. You’re not thinking, you’re just moving.
Regular listeners of Gus know he’s a clever lyricist, quick with wordplay and a turn of phrase, but some of the best moments on 4 Dear Life exist in a place beyond language. “Holding On” opens with an evocative snippet of a lyric — “I woke up with Danny’s song stuck in my head” —and becomes a walloping house song. With a rubbery bass line like this, who needs words?
When Gus does pick up the pen he’s all the more deliberate. The heart of the album is “Queen,” which did begin with some guitar chords and eventually grew into the track Gus is most proud of. “I’ve been so pissed off the last couple years about the state of the world,” he explains, and he channeled that energy into a kind of protest song about the tyranny of shitty men. “I wanna be one of the girls,” he sings on the hook, vocals unfiltered as he expresses a complex yearning to escape a game — gender and its socially inscribed roles — that no one actually signs up for. “No man is a king to a queen,” he pronounces. It’s got a message and it’s catchy. Amen.
4 Dear Life takes its title from the expression “holding on for dear life,” and Gus describes the
album as his attempt to find hope in times of struggle. “Dancing while the world’s on fire,” he
muses, acknowledging that it may sound cheesy, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The
serotonin is real. The community is real. In between songs, knitting the album together, are little interstitial moments of random conversation between Gus’ friends. That’s all very real.
On paper and in practice, 4 Dear Life may sound like a departure from his previous albums but it’s more grounded in his day-to-day life than some of his earlier work. It’s a dance record that leaps from the streets and vibey spaces of a specific New York era in the same way a great Deee-Lite record operates for the ’90s rave scene, or a Rapture record for 2000s dance-punk.
For Gus Dapperton and for us, this is a time capsule that speaks (often without words) to our
era, and also a model for life during wartime, when everyone needs someone and something to hold onto. 4 Dear Life isn't about escaping the world; it's about finding enough joy to live in it.