Devon Again (Devon Johanningmeier, born around 2001-02) is a queer alt-pop singer-songwriter from Denver, based in Los Angeles, and one of the most consequential signings in modern pop: in May 2026 she became the second artist ever signed to Dan Nigro’s Amusement Records at Interscope, after Chappell Roan. Her EP In Order (2025) was, per The FADER’s GEN F profile, her “true breakout”; its “cherry cola” video was SPIN’s #4 music video of 2025; her major-label debut “snake the drain” launched atop Apple Music’s New Music Daily with her as cover star; and she spends 2026-27 as direct support on Olivia Rodrigo’s 65-date Unraveled arena tour.
She majored in vocals at Denver School of the Arts and credits choir over theory: “The thing about art school that was more helpful to me was singing in a choir!... Never in my adult life have I had to look at a key signature.” The FADER surfaced the harder part: while still in high school she moved into a Colorado sober-living facility with her mother, who was in treatment. An only child, she traces her widescreen emotional register to that solitude: “I thought my life was really important and I was the only one experiencing it.” She wrote her first songs in eighth grade and has said the career was never a decision: “I don’t know... I just always wanted to do it, music has always been it.” Growing up queer in the Denver area, she has described music as a refuge, a way of imagining and creating a new reality. The teenage catalog still sits on SoundCloud, tracks like “Unfolding,” “libra season” and “Green” dating back to 2017 (“the songs on my Soundcloud from high school are simply not as good... There was a switch in me where I was like ‘Wait I want to make pop music, I want people to have a good time’”).
She graduated high school in 2019 and moved to Los Angeles the same year. After one semester studying jazz at Musicians Institute she dropped out, and the LA survival years began: first an artist community off Melrose where residents slept in what The FADER describes as a “cubby for a human body,” then a garage attached to a house, also off Melrose, where the career started working. A 2020 polka-beat TikTok went viral and brought the first “so many men” industry meetings, which she navigated cold: “I would get on the phone and be like, What does this mean? ‘What is an A&R?’” One of those connections became producer Cameron Hale (Khalid, Sadie Jean), who co-wrote and produced her debut single “Suburbia” (July 2021), the TikTok-teased breakout that passed 5 million Spotify streams and seeded the fanbase, and who helped shape the debut EP that followed.
The early singles set the tonal range she still works in. “Burn Down” (October 2021) delivered coy commentary on LA’s ruthlessness through the absurd premise of her apartment burning down; “All My Fault” and “Shitty People” followed in 2022; Ones to Watch heard in “HEAD” a mellow opening that builds to “an explosive rush of emotion.” The 2022 debut EP PEE earned cover placement on Spotify’s alternative flagship playlist Lorem (over a million followers) alongside Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, beabadoobee, Clairo and Omar Apollo, promoted with a viral homemade album trailer. She opened for Denzel Curry, Toro y Moi and JAWNY around LA, and in 2022, in the loop pop history will keep citing, she opened for a pre-fame Chappell Roan. By March 2023 Ones to Watch dubbed her “the alt-pop renegade charting her own path,” reviewing an El Rey Theater set that opened with a mission statement: “Have we done our affirmations today? No? Well, we’re not f-ing doing them here.” “deep” (September 2023, produced by Jon Buscema, her core collaborator since) premiered on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music 1 show; she remembers the writing-room doubt fondly: “Jon and I weren’t sure if it was really corny or... really awesome. As we started chipping away at the song... the story, and the music itself, just kept getting... deeper.” A 16-city North American tour supporting Maude Latour followed, including a hometown Denver stop.
Her 2024-25 run came via Pizzaslime Records, the label that grew out of a clothing brand, co-founded by Nick Santiago and Matt Hwang in collaboration with Diplo’s Mad Decent, released under an exclusive license to Decent Distribution. The “cherry cola”/“sunburn” two-pack (July 2024, produced by Buscema, mixed by Andrew Maury) told one relationship in two parts, the euphoric high and the aftermath. “People v. Maryanne Sue” and its companion “lover” (May 2025, written with Buscema and Carrie K) staged a queer country-pop courtroom narrative about betrayal that pulled 170,000-plus Spotify streams shortly after release. A collaboration with slimdan, “Nosebleeds” (March 2025), rounded out the era. Then came In Order (November 2025), five songs (“skittles,” “cherry cola,” “sunburn,” “Never Goes Away,” “overagain”) written about touring PEE while grieving a heartbreak, with outpatient therapy prolonging the sessions. The FADER called it her true breakout; SPIN named the “cherry cola” video its #4 music video of 2025, “a deliriously entertaining montage of sight gags, relatable problems, and sudden moments of beauty and profundity.”
The thread started October 2024, when Dan Nigro shared “never goes away” on Instagram. Eighteen months later, Billboard announced her as Amusement Records’ second-ever signing, to the imprint Nigro founded in 2023 specifically to support Chappell Roan after Atlantic dropped her. Nigro’s statement read like a thesis: “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.” Interscope EVP of A&R Matt Morris added: “We’ve been admirers of her work for quite some time.” The debut two-pack “snake the drain” / “this time it’s different” (June 2, 2026) marked the sound loosening again: “‘Snake the Drain’ is the song that helped me play in the mud again. Making In Order had been really heavy.” Roan’s mentoring advice, when Devon voiced the fear (“It’s such a specific fear: What will happen if I get famous?”): “No, don’t [quit]. That’s the only advice that’s valuable.” A full-length debut is in progress, teased by her as full of “boy music.”
One clarification worth making on the record, because it circulates: Devon Again has no affiliation with HYBE, Geffen or the group KATSEYE. The connection is a single anecdote. At an industry showcase in Australia in May 2026 she watched KATSEYE rehearse and was moved to tears by their cohesion, a moment The FADER used precisely to contrast her position: “Like the rabbit, and unlike KATSEYE, Devon is a solo act.”
Blue hair matching surrealist backdrops, a toilet-bowl snack prop her band eats goldfish crackers from mid-set, an EP named PEE, and inside the jokes, writing The FADER calls “big-feeling pop music” that “can soundtrack any coming-of-age flick”: “I miss you like hot rain / Like red dirt / Like a river.” Critics read the irreverence as “an unexpected element of genuineness”: raw storytelling with “spunky sensitivity,” a sound BuzzBands.la called “nostalgic yet modern at the same time.” Her queerness is central and stated: “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!” OUT FRONT Magazine placed her in the new wave of openly queer pop artists alongside Chappell Roan and Renee Rapp, and she frames the openness generationally: “It’s cool to be a queer artist because being open about it is different than it ever has been.” The songwriting is self-discovery in real time: “I tend to write about things that are deeply bothering me without even realizing it... sometimes I don’t know what I’m feeling until I listen back to the song I just made.” And it keeps moving toward exposure: “I think I’m just becoming more honest in my writing. Which is so scary.” Influences run Paramore/Hayley Williams (the middle-school obsession), James Blake, Emawk, Portishead, Erykah Badu, JPEGMafia, Danny Brown, Frost Children, Ashnikko, Big Thief, Deftones, Cake, Tyler, the Creator and even country writer HARDY.
The visual catalog is largely self-directed or co-directed with a recurring circle: “deep” and “cherry cola” shot with Ethan Frank, “still can’t dress myself” co-directed with Jacqueline Kulla, and the acoustic “gum v6.4” video built around actor Robert Rexx recreating home-video nostalgia from a La-Z-Boy. The 2026 major-label videos for “snake the drain” and “this time it’s different” went to Kaylinn Duffy (Don Toliver, Aiden Bissett), the first step toward bigger-budget cinema without losing the sight-gag DNA that SPIN rewarded. On the music side the constant is Jon Buscema (Conan Gray, Slothrust), her producer and co-writer from “deep” onward, with early foundations from Cameron Hale and one-off collaborations with slimdan (written with Danny Silberstein and Brian Brundage, produced by Ryan Linvill and slimdan).
The stage show grew up in LA support slots (Denzel Curry, Toro y Moi, JAWNY, the El Rey bill with Wallice) and a 16-city Maude Latour tour. The Unraveled Tour (September 2026-May 2027), announced April 30, 2026, puts her in front of arenas across the North American leg from Atlanta to Las Vegas, including Intuit Dome (Los Angeles) and Barclays Center (Brooklyn) residencies alongside The Last Dinner Party. Her tour debut comes November 2026 at Philadelphia’s Xfinity Mobile Arena, capacity 21,000. Asked what she’d tell her younger self, she keeps it structural: “Moving to LA and continuing to live in LA despite how hard it was, and not quitting. This is one of the things, one of the whys you keep going.”
The career splits into three clean eras: independent (2021-23, the Hale and early Buscema singles), Pizzaslime Records under exclusive license to Decent Distribution (2024-25), and Amusement/Interscope (2026-). Her publishing runs as Devon Again Publishing with These Are Pulse Songs (BMI), administered worldwide by Concord Music Publishing. The last verified independent-era streaming snapshot, from Music Metrics Vault in August 2025, showed roughly 250,000 monthly Spotify listeners and 64,000 followers, numbers that predate the Interscope signing and the Rodrigo tour announcement and almost certainly undercount her now.
Her fanbase is community-driven and slightly chaotic in the way the music predicts: threads surface organically on r/popheads (the “cherry cola” video, the major-label two-pack), r/listentothis (filing “People v. Maryanne Sue” under “pop punk?”) and even r/brakence (“PLEASE listen to Devin Again!!”). Press coverage runs from the loyal early adopters (Ones to Watch, BuzzBands.la, OUT FRONT, Almost Famous Zine) to the 2026 institutional stamp: Billboard for the signing, The FADER’s GEN F for the profile, femmusic and Unraveled Edit around the debut single. For the record, her handles do not match her name: Instagram is @trashytrashy, TikTok is @bodylikelego, X is @devonagain420, and the SoundCloud archive lives at /devonagain.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Teenage songs (“Unfolding,” “libra season”) archived on SoundCloud |
| 2019 | Graduates Denver School of the Arts (vocals); moves to Los Angeles; one semester of jazz at Musicians Institute |
| 2020 | Polka-beat TikTok goes viral; first industry meetings |
| 2021 | “Suburbia” (July, with Cameron Hale) breaks out; “Burn Down” follows |
| 2022 | Debut EP PEE; Spotify Lorem cover placement; opens for Denzel Curry, Toro y Moi, JAWNY and a pre-fame Chappell Roan |
| 2023 | Ones to Watch profile; “deep” premieres on Zane Lowe; 16-city Maude Latour tour |
| 2024 | “cherry cola”/“sunburn” on Pizzaslime; Dan Nigro shares “never goes away” on Instagram (October) |
| 2025 | “People v. Maryanne Sue”; In Order EP (November); SPIN’s #4 video of 2025 |
| 2026 | Signs to Amusement/Interscope (May 28); “snake the drain” tops New Music Daily; FADER GEN F profile; Unraveled Tour support announced |
| 2027 | Unraveled Tour runs through May; debut album in progress (“boy music”) |
Press is split between “Johnanningmeier” (BuzzBands.la, 2023) and “Johanningmeier” (The FADER, Billboard, and her Apple Music songwriter credits). This page uses Johanningmeier, the spelling in the most recent major-outlet coverage and publishing credits.
No outlet has printed a birth date. Ones to Watch called her 21 in March 2023, BuzzBands.la said 22 that September, Last.fm listed 23 in late 2024, and The FADER said “mid-20s” in 2026, all consistent with a birth year around 2001-02.
No. She watched KATSEYE rehearse at an Australian industry showcase in May 2026 and was moved by it; that FADER anecdote is the entire connection. Her label is Amusement Records at Interscope.
She runs the Devon Again project through her personal handle @trashytrashy rather than a name-matched account. TikTok is @bodylikelego, X is @devonagain420.
“Suburbia” (July 2021) was the first official single, though SoundCloud preserves self-released material back to 2017.
In progress as of mid-2026, unreleased and untitled, described by her as full of “boy music.”
| Year | Title | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | snake the drain / this time it’s different | Major-label debut | Amusement/Interscope; #1 New Music Daily |
| 2025 | In Order (skittles · cherry cola · sunburn · Never Goes Away · overagain) · People v. Maryanne Sue / lover · Nosebleeds (w/ slimdan) | EP · Singles | Pizzaslime; SPIN #4 video of 2025 |
| 2023-24 | deep · gum (v6.4) · still can’t dress myself · cherry cola/sunburn · never goes away | Singles | Buscema era; Zane Lowe premiere |
| 2021-22 | Suburbia · Burn Down · All My Fault · Shitty People · HEAD · PEE | Singles · Debut EP | Spotify Lorem cover |
One more documented root: Devon appears on the official artist roster of Live 2 Create, the LA collective founded by McClain Portis, making her one of the few publicly confirmed members of the network that also pulled Christian Gates into the city. The community-first career logic places her beside Ella Boh’s Butterfly Movement and TX2’s X Movement in the scene The Ring tracks: belonging first, scale second. For the other side of the label spectrum, the self-owned route, see Dutch Melrose’s MADKID Records. Scene neighbors on this wiki include Tiffany Day, another queer-forward alt-pop songwriter who built an audience joke-first, and Nessa Barrett for the adjacent dark-pop map.