At 11 p.m. on a Thursday, Isaac Dunbar is spinning in a cramped rehearsal studio on Chrystie Street, sweat darkening the collar of his vintage Meshki tank top. The 19-year-old singer-songwriter has spent the last three hours rehearsing choreography for his upcoming tour—his first as a headliner—yet when the choreographer calls a break, Dunbar waves her off. "One more time," he insists, restarting the track himself. The song, an unreleased cut from his debut album Evil Twin (due September via RCA Records), layers glitchy hyperpop synths over a acoustic guitar loop he wrote at 16 in his childhood bedroom in Barnstable, Massachusetts.
This is the tension that defines Dunbar: a classically trained dancer who discovered Britney Spears choreography on YouTube at age eight; a Cape Cod kid who now treats the Lower East Side as his second home; an artist whose TikTok following of 2.3 million built slowly through bedroom performances before his 2022 EP Banish the Banshee cracked Spotify's Global Viral 50. He contains multitudes, though he'd never put it that way. "I just get bored doing one thing," he admits, catching his breath against the mirror.
From Ballet Barres to Bedroom Pop
Dunbar's dance education began conventionally enough: ballet and contemporary at the Cape Cod Dance Center, starting at age five. By twelve, he'd added hip-hop, drawn to the form's permission for individual expression. "Ballet was about disappearing into the choreography," he explains. "Hip-hop was about refusing to disappear." He credits this dual training with shaping his stage presence—controlled enough to execute precise formations, loose enough to improvise when the moment demands.
What the training also provided was a vocabulary for managing anxiety that predated his music career. During his freshman year at Barnstable High, Dunbar began experiencing panic attacks he couldn't name. "I'd be in class and suddenly need to move, had to," he recalls. He'd request bathroom breaks to run stairwells or find empty corridors where he could execute combinations from muscle memory. "Dance was the only thing that quieted the noise. Still is."
This bodily relationship to emotion permeates his music. On Banish the Banshee's standout track "Scorton's Creek," his vocals slide from whispered verses to a chorus that demands full-throated release—a dynamic he developed by mapping melodic arcs to physical movement. "I'll choreograph a song before I finish producing it," he says. "The body knows where the song wants to go before the brain catches up."
The Evil Twin as Artistic Method
Dunbar's fascination with duality isn't merely aesthetic; it's structural. Evil Twin's title references a concept he's explored since his earliest singles: the coexistence of contradictory selves. The album's lead single, "Bleach," pairs lyrics about compulsive self-sabotage ("I ruin everything before it ruins me") with production so buoyant it initially scans as pure serotonin—a deliberate mismatch Dunbar fought his A&R team to preserve.
"They wanted it darker, more 'authentic' to the lyrics," he says, making air quotes. "But that's the point. The feeling of fucking up your own life doesn't arrive in minor keys. It arrives while you're laughing at a party, while you're pretending." This insistence on emotional complexity over mood-board coherence distinguishes his work from the confessional pop that dominates his streaming playlists.
The duality extends to his creative process. Dunbar writes primarily between midnight and 4 a.m., alone in his Alphabet City apartment, yet his reference points are aggressively social: the communal choreography of early 2000s MTV, the collective effervescence of downtown drag shows, the democratic chaos of a crowded dance floor. "I'm making music for alone time that wants to become together time," he suggests. "Or maybe the reverse."
Downtown as Material, Not Backdrop
For an artist so invested in physical space, Dunbar's relationship to downtown Manhattan resists easy romanticization. He first visited at fifteen, accompanying his mother to a medical conference, and spent the weekend alone, riding the subway to random stops, walking until his phone died. "I got lost on purpose," he remembers. "In Barnstable, everyone knows your parents. Here, nobody knew I existed. It was terrifying and exhilarating—the first time I felt both things equally."
That paradox—anonymity as liberation, density as intimacy—now informs his songwriting. He name-checks specific locations with the precision of a documentarian: the "cracked tile and permanent dusk" of the now-closed Cake Shop, where he played his first New York show at seventeen; the "aggressive hopefulness" of
