Before there was a two-pack topping Apple Music's New Music Daily, before there was an arena tour with Olivia Rodrigo, there was a cubby off Melrose Avenue, literally a space the size of a human body, where Devon Again slept when she first moved to Los Angeles in 2019. Seven years later, she is the second artist ever signed to Dan Nigro's Amusement Records, a distinction that until May 2026 belonged to exactly one person.
The Cubby Off Melrose
Devon Johanningmeier grew up in Denver, majored in vocals at Denver School of the Arts, and has said the choir room did more for her than any theory class ever could: "Never in my adult life have I had to look at a key signature." She also spent part of high school in a Colorado sober-living facility with her mother, an experience she has connected directly to the widescreen emotional register of her writing: "I thought my life was really important and I was the only one experiencing it."
She graduated in 2019, moved to LA, lasted one semester studying jazz at Musicians Institute, then dropped out into the survival years: the cubby, then a garage attached to a house, also off Melrose, where the career finally started moving. A 2020 polka-beat TikTok went viral and triggered a wave of industry calls she took with no vocabulary for the room: "I would get on the phone and be like, What does this mean? 'What is an A&R?'"
Suburbia to PEE
One of those cold calls led to producer Cameron Hale, who co-wrote her debut single "Suburbia" (July 2021), a TikTok-teased breakout that has since passed 5 million Spotify streams. "Burn Down" followed that October, using the absurd premise of her own apartment burning down to needle LA's ruthlessness. The 2022 debut EP PEE landed a cover placement on Spotify's alternative flagship playlist Lorem, alongside Billie Eilish and beabadoobee, and she spent that year opening for Denzel Curry, Toro y Moi, JAWNY, and, in the loop pop history keeps citing, a pre-fame Chappell Roan.
By 2023, "deep" premiered on Zane Lowe's Apple Music 1 show and sent her on a 16-city tour supporting Maude Latour. The Buscema era, named for producer Jon Buscema, had begun, and it would define everything that came next.
The Pizzaslime Chapter
2024 and 2025 belonged to Pizzaslime Records, the label-turned-clothing-brand co-founded by Nick Santiago and Matt Hwang with Diplo's Mad Decent. The "cherry cola"/"sunburn" two-pack told one relationship in two parts, euphoric high and hungover aftermath, and "People v. Maryanne Sue," a queer country-pop courtroom narrative about betrayal, pulled more than 170,000 Spotify streams within days. Then came In Order, a five-song EP written while touring PEE and grieving a breakup, outpatient therapy stretching the sessions long. The FADER called it her true breakout. SPIN ranked the "cherry cola" video its #4 music video of 2025.
She slept in a space the size of her own body. Now she headlines the New Music Daily cover.
The Second Artist
Dan Nigro first shared "never goes away" on his Instagram in October 2024. Eighteen months later, Billboard confirmed she would become the second artist signed to Amusement Records, the imprint Dan Nigro built in 2023 specifically to catch Chappell Roan after Atlantic dropped her.
Dev embodies everything I look for when signing an artist. A clearly defined vision with the ability to seamlessly transition between beautifully crafted songs that tug at your heartstrings and writing playfully bold pop with ease, without sacrificing any of her essence.Dan Nigro, Amusement Records
The debut two-pack "snake the drain" / "this time it's different" arrived June 2, 2026 and topped Apple Music's New Music Daily with Devon as cover star. She has described the loosening in the writing itself: "'Snake the Drain' is the song that helped me play in the mud again. Making In Order had been really heavy." When she voiced the specific fear that comes with a bigger platform, "What will happen if I get famous?", Roan's advice was blunt: "No, don't [quit]. That's the only advice that's valuable."
Community, Then Arenas
Her queerness is not subtext, it is the stated organizing principle: "One of the biggest points of music for me is community, and it makes me feel very happy and safe knowing that a majority of my audience is queer solely because my music is queer!" As of 2026-07, the last public snapshot of her numbers, roughly 250,000 monthly Spotify listeners from August 2025, already reads as a fossil, undercounting an artist about to play Intuit Dome and a Barclays Center residency on Rodrigo's 65-date Unraveled Tour, debuting that November at Philadelphia's 21,000-capacity Xfinity Mobile Arena.
One more thread ties her to this scene without defining her: she sits on the official roster of Live 2 Create, the collective founded by McClain Portis that has also pulled Christian Gates into its network, a small structural overlap in an industry that runs on exactly this kind of shared address book. Devon Again's own address, for now, is a much bigger one: the same imprint that made Chappell Roan a household name, betting the second chair matters as much as the first.