BURBERRY coat, sweater and pants. — **BURBERRY** coat, sweater and pants.

LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S jacket and pants and talent’s own shoes. — **LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S** jacket and pants and talent’s own shoes.

In this chaotic year, the music studio has come to symbolize calm, freedom, and respite from the constant heavy news and challenges in our lifestyles. Inside these studios, the landscape for R&B continues to expand further into genre-bending compositions that surpass the sounds of the past. Classic rhythm and blues melodies are now attached to heavy trap baselines with lo-fi infusions. Alternative R&B is anchored in diversity, and its torchbearers are no better manifested than in producer-singer duo, dvsn.

LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S jacket and sunglasses. — **LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S** jacket and sunglasses.

Daniel Daley and Paul “Nineteen85” Jefferies met through mutual friends and bonded over music. As a singer and songwriter, Daley was known for his lyrical skill and enticing voice. Nineteen85 was known for his masterful beats filled with energy and movement. The duo’s initial goal was to land as writers and producers on other artists’ albums, but eventually their managers encouraged them to put out the music as their own. Together, the Toronto-based artists formed dvsn after realizing their autonomy in the scene—nobody could quite do what they did as a unit with the fixed singer and producer combination. “Daniel’s a phenomenal singer, and I just preferred having him on my beats more than anybody else,” says 85.

The name, dvsn, pronounced “division,” stems from their similar stories, in which both wanted to build a record label that symbolized differentiation from the pack of oversaturation. Nineteen85 continues, “One of us said, ‘We just need something that is like a division between what everybody else is do- ing and what we’re doing. We’re like, that’s it—division!’ It just kind of stuck since then, but it was never based on us being a group—that was what our team or label was supposed to be called. And then when we had to figure out a group name, be- cause we didn’t plan to be a group, that was the only thing that we’d even ever talked about. So it kind of was before it was.”

That it was. September 5, 2015, dvsn released two singles marking the beginning of their career under the new moniker. March of 2016, their first studio album, Sept. 5th, was released just weeks after they announced they’d signed to fellow Toronto musician Drake’s OVO Sound record label. Their next album, Morning After, debuted October 2017, and in April of 2020, in the heat of the coronavirus pandemic, dvsn released A Muse in Her Feelings.

“One thing about defining moments is,” Daley says regard- ing their trajectory, “I don’t know if anybody ever realizes them when they’re in them. I definitely think this is the first time that I’ve noticed that people are realizing how big dvsn can be and how far we can take this and that. We’re not going to be a predictable group that plateaus anytime soon. I think that people have realized that off this album.”

The guys describe A Muse in Her Feelings as a familiar story that was inspired by a conversational trend, in which a bunch of people they knew were immersed in their feelings and struggling to figure out which way to go. “You know, life experience,” Daley details. “That’s kind of where it all starts. All our music starts with that. We’re not the kind of group that just gets in the studio every single day and makes music. We go outside. We live. We expand, and then we bring it all to the table at the end. You know, it’s a bunch of different vibes with a bunch of different feelings at the same time, and definitely took a lot of inspiration from what was going on in our lives and the lives of the people that we were coming into contact with.”

CHRISTIAN WIJNANTS shirt, t-shirt, and shorts and MCM shoes. — **CHRISTIAN WIJNANTS** shirt, t-shirt, and shorts and **MCM** shoes.

Many songs off A Muse In Her Feelings include sexy themes that were executed to perfection by Daley’s tenor to falsetto vocal range and 85’s transformative production. What was once bedroom music is now lifestyle music with a message in connectivity, rooted in a boundaryless sound. “I want to make sure,” 85 explains, “that even from the production standpoint, I was giving Daniel a canvas that could fit in so many other settings, besides just the bedroom. It gave him a lot more room to play on this album. He’s into some things that you didn’t hear the first couple of albums because the production never allowed in that space.”

As a result, the two further substantiated their claim to the R&B realm, a space where they accentuate each other’s unique essence and effortless chemistry. And like many successful combinations, the backbone is trust. With no studio session ever following a simple format, dvsn work within their natural tempo and push one another’s limits. “It’s not really like any formula,” Daley says with a laugh, “Sometimes I’ll come in there with a topic or an idea or a voice note. Sometimes 85 comes in there with a guitar loop or, you know, a beat he started, and usually from there, we walk in the studio. The only thing that’s probably consistent is that we never sit down and start to get to work. We get in there, and we end up talking about whatever is going on, into song ideas, and usually the conversation just kind of leads us into the records that we end up making. It’s like our sessions almost start off with therapy sessions.”

BOSS coat, shirt, and pants. — **BOSS** coat, shirt, and pants.

172_FLAUNT_MAGAZINE_CHAOS_AND_CALM_FLAUNT.COM_WEB_DVSN_8.jpg — **SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** shirt, pants, and boots.

Agreeing, 85 adds, “I would say we have so much trust in each other, we both have very unrealistic expectations of the other person. Like if I were to walk into a session with somebody else, I wouldn’t say a topic and be like, ‘So finish the song now,’ but because I have such strange expectations of Daniel, it could be the most random thing, I’ll just be like, ‘Yes and let’s finish that right now.’”

That trust is what allows them to work freely and get it done. Although dvsn have released three albums in five years, they are merely scratching the surface of where they can and want to go. Daley attests, “A lot of people haven’t seen the full capabilities of 85 that I’ve seen, even though he has how many hits and how many records? I know how many things you guys still haven’t seen from him, and vice versa. We have a lot of different places to go and places that we plan to take you with the music. It’s just, you know, we’re doing it one by one.”

Not only did A Muse in Her Feelings exceed expectations, but the timing of the release, coupled with a narrative that spoke to many, provided an escape from the world’s “new normal.” To compliment this, dvsn set the tone for the new format R&B concert, with a series of drive-in shows that completely sold out in Toronto. “We are one of the first major artists to put out a project when there were strict quarantine rules,” 85 shares, “I think we want to be remembered as that little bit of hope that happened in the middle of this time. I think people having that memory of 2020—whether it be from the passing of Kobe, to the racial tensions, to the health pandemic—that in the midst of all of that, dvsn still somehow managed to hear my thoughts and put them into song, you know, to give me that little bit of hope or the little bit of relatability that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.”

And it’s true the record is a sweet reminder that you are not alone—precisely what the two wanted, which will hold its weight for years to come. “Now we’re doing shows,” 85 concludes, “and we’ll be one of the first acts to really try and figure out this whole drive-in thing, especially from our genre. I think that more than anything, I want people to feel like we’re one of them. Exactly how you feel is how we feel, which is why you relate to us when we make music. If nothing else, I want them to feel like dvsn stood with us. dvsn is one of us.”