Dylan Gossett, a coal singer, signs with Big Loud Texas/Mercury Records: A Perfect World

Dylan Gossett has turned “Coal” right into a diamond this 12 months.

The 24-year-old Texan earned a streaming hit with the self-written tune, which reached the highest 5 on Spotify’s all-genre Viral 50 chart and has amassed 39.5 million complete on-demand official U.S. streams, in line with Luminate. “Coal” presently stands at No. 35 on Billboard’s Scorching Nation Songs chart.

Initially self-released, “Coal” is now the cornerstone of Gossett’s new EP, No Higher Time (launched Oct. 27), whereas the singer is newly signed to Massive Loud Texas/Mercury Information in collaboration with Vary Media Companions. Massive Loud Texas was not too long ago launched as a enterprise between Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall and Massive Loud Information.

“Tyler [Arnold] and Jake [Levensohn] from Mercury flew down to Texas to meet with me, and we instantly clicked,” says Gossett of his signing. “After meeting with Jon, Miranda and Seth [England] from Big Loud, it was a dream scenario to be able to combine forces and do this all together as a team.”

Gossett wrote “Coal” almost two years in the past and, on the time, had no plans to make music professionally. His greatest objective was taking part in for household gatherings at his grandfather’s lake home.

“Whenever holidays like Thanksgiving or Easter come around, my brother, parents, cousins, we all sit around a campfire and pass guitars around,” Gossett says. “Mainly, me, my brother and my cousin would play songs we wrote, but everyone would sing.”

Earlier this 12 months, Gossett started posting songs on TikTok, together with covers of The Lumineers’ “Ophelia” and Flatland Cavalry’s “A Life Where We Work Out.” In June, he launched the unique tune “To Be Free,” which has earned 6.5 million on-demand official U.S. streams, in line with Luminate. However “Coal,” launched in July, proved to be his breakthrough, bolstering his Spotify depend to greater than 4 million month-to-month listeners.

“‘Coal’ is just a meaningful song I wrote about a tougher time,” Gossett says. “I felt like I was in a bit of a rut with my career and had some family things going on. Writing that song helped me to mentally just get through it and I think that’s why it’s so relatable to people as well — everybody goes through these types of things every day. When I saw the response to the video I put online of ‘Coal,’ I told my wife, Julia, ‘I have to record this song right now.’ I had a mic that Julia got me for Christmas and a little audio box, and recorded ‘Coal’ on my laptop, just sitting in my bedroom.”

The tune anchors No Higher Time, a homespun undertaking that Gossett absolutely wrote, recorded, produced and blended on his laptop computer within the bed room of the couple’s house simply outdoors of Austin. The undertaking debuted at No. 7 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums Chart.

“I played all the instruments, except for [the] fiddle parts. I had a good friend come in and play those — I can’t play fiddle,” he says with amusing. “The cover art is a photo my friend Billy took of me recording. It fully encompasses a homemade project. It’s inspiring that you can have a really cool sounding record, literally just from your bedroom with a hundred bucks of equipment.”

Each tune on No Higher Time is threaded via with Gossett’s poetic lyrics. “What does it take to feel alive?/ Do you need the lows to love the highs?” he asks on “Flip a Coin.” He muses that “Sweat on your skin is better than regret on your heart” within the encouraging “No Better Time” and paints a narrative of a gunslinger’s final moments in “Lone Ole Cowboy” with the lyric, “I hear the bullets fly as I make my final stand/ I’m a man with a gun shaking in my hand.”

He describes “Lone Ole Cowboy” as paying homage to “Colter Wall kind of stuff. I always joke that I’m not a cowboy, but I like writing songs about them. And the song is all in major chords, so it’s one of the happier murder ballads out there,” he provides with a chuckle, noting that he and his brother needed to get resourceful to get the metal guitar sound on the tune. “We didn’t have a steel guitar, so my brother put his guitar on his lap and played it with like an Xbox controller or a remote.”

Gossett’s first musical influences had been fashioned across the fifth grade, when he was impressed by such Ed Sheeran songs as “The A Team” and “Give Me Love.”

“I could just picture the song in my head when he sang it,” Gossett recollects. “I got a guitar for my birthday and just started learning to play. When I heard his ‘+’ album, it just sounded so different from what I was hearing on the radio every day. That just changed my whole world of music.”

Gossett studied at Texas A&M College and, in 2021, he started interning in occasion operations and logistics for Components 1 Circuit of the Americas racetrack in Austin. He stationed his dad and mom’ RV simply outdoors the observe for 3 months whereas he generally labored 20-hour shifts. He was provided a job a couple of months later.

“When F1 comes to town, it’s the craziest couple of weeks of your life if you are a worker there. But it helped me in knowing how to deal with high-intensity situations. The adversity you are used to in the event world, it helps when you are on the road and you just have to adapt to changing situations.”

Gossett was working on the racetrack when calls from labels started pouring in after the success of “Coal.”

“It was hectic for a while—it felt like all the labels were calling,” he recollects. “I told my boss, ‘I need to take PTO for a week and figure things out.’” He formally stop his job on the racetrack in September to deal with music.

“They asked me to sing the national anthem there a few weeks ago. I was up in the tower singing and I could literally see where my RV used to be,” he provides of his Oct. 22 efficiency on the F1 Finale in Austin.

Gossett has been steadily piling up live performance appearances touring Wyatt Flores and Brent Cobb with extra reveals to return this 12 months with Luke Grimes and Kolby Cooper. He’s slated to make his first pageant look at SXSW subsequent 12 months, and can open reveals for Midland.

Following No Higher Time’s stripped-down fashion, Gossett predicts a full-band album launch in 2024.

“No Better Time shows who I am right now as a songwriter and artist. It’s all just homemade and that’s so important to me. I have a lot of songs I want to build out in a bigger way, but I can’t bring the full drum kit into my bedroom,” he says with amusing. “This project is more stripped back and I don’t think I’ll ever lose that sound, but I definitely want more songs with a bigger bang to them.”