Powfu is the recording name of Isaiah Faber (born March 31, 1999, in Vancouver, British Columbia), a Canadian singer, songwriter, rapper and producer raised in the small town of Mission, B.C. He is best known for “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head),” a 2019 bedroom recording built around a sample of beabadoobee's “Coffee” that went viral on TikTok, spent 29 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, crossed a billion Spotify streams, and helped carry the melancholic “sad rap” strain of lo-fi hip-hop from SoundCloud obscurity into mainstream pop culture.
Isaiah Faber was born March 31, 1999, in Vancouver, British Columbia, but grew up roughly an hour outside the city in Mission, a town of fewer than 40,000 people about 15 minutes from the US border. He has described Mission as having “smalltown vibes” and deep farm-culture roots, while also identifying in interviews as being “from Vancouver East,” reflecting the broader Greater Vancouver identity that anchors his artist bio.
Music runs in the family. His father, Dave Faber, fronted the Canadian pop-punk band Faber Drive, which signed to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger's label 604 Records in 2006, landed five Top 40 singles in Canada, toured with Simple Plan and Metro Station, and earned a Juno Award nomination for New Group of the Year in 2008. Isaiah learned to play drums at age two because his father wanted his children involved in music, and he grew up watching his dad tour for months at a time, an experience he has described as isolating and one that made him a target of extra attention from classmates who knew him as “this famous guy's son.” Dave Faber later became his son's manager, a family arrangement both have discussed publicly, including in a 2026 joint interview titled “How to Build a Billion-Stream Music Brand from Your Bedroom.”
As a teenager, Faber borrowed his father's microphone and began rapping over “super relaxing” beats he found online, recording in his basement or bedroom and uploading tracks to SoundCloud while still in high school. He started writing songs around age 12 “just for fun” but began taking music seriously at 17. He left high school halfway through grade 12, went to college early, and graduated, before starting to earn money from music roughly a year after his first SoundCloud uploads. His influences span the punk acts his father's career put him around, Yellowcard, Blink-182, Simple Plan and Sum 41, alongside hip-hop figures such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, B.o.B, Eminem and Mac Miller, whom he credits to his uncle's influence. He has also cited Nicholas Sparks films, including The Notebook, Dear John and The Best of Me, as narrative inspiration for his songwriting.
Powfu's origin story is one of the definitive case studies in TikTok-era virality. In February 2019, while browsing SoundCloud for beat inspiration, Faber came across an instrumental by producer Otterpop built around a sampled hook from “Coffee,” the 2017 debut single by Filipino-British singer-songwriter beabadoobee (Beatrice Laus). Inspired by Nicholas Sparks-style romance narratives, Faber wrote lyrics from the perspective of a young man saying a final goodbye to his girlfriend from his deathbed, opening with the line “I don't wanna fall asleep, I don't wanna pass away.” He uploaded the track, titled simply “Death Bed,” to SoundCloud and YouTube on February 9, 2019, without initially clearing the “Coffee” sample.
The song picked up traction slowly at first, reaching 5 million plays on SoundCloud and 24 million on YouTube after being picked up by the YouTube channel Promoting Sounds roughly a year before its major breakout. The real explosion came via TikTok, where a “love confession” challenge used the song's most quotable 15 seconds, “Don't stay awake for too long, don't go to bed, I'll make a cup of coffee for your head,” as a backing track, generating close to a million response videos and pushing the song into ubiquity, including use in tribute videos following Kobe Bryant's death in January 2020. At its peak virality in March 2020, the song reportedly drew four billion TikTok plays in a single month.
Because the “Coffee” sample had not been cleared, Powfu could not officially release the song commercially for roughly a year while the necessary licensing was negotiated, an unusual case of a song going viral in bootleg form before its legal release. Once cleared, the song was re-released as “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head),” crediting beabadoobee as a featured artist, commercially on February 8, 2020. This commercial release triggered Powfu's signing to Columbia Records in the United States, with UK label Robots + Humans handling the release there. The track anchored his debut Columbia EP, Poems of the Past, released May 29, 2020, which also featured a bonus remix with a guest verse from Mark Hoppus of Blink-182, a dream collaboration Faber says he specifically requested from his label, telling one interviewer that Blink-182 were “the number one people I wanted to work with and they made it happen.”
By June 2021, “Death Bed” had surpassed 1 billion streams on Spotify, making Powfu, per Sony Music Canada, “one of the only Canadian artists to have a song reach 1 Billion streams on Spotify.” By late 2020 the song had already been certified Double Platinum with over 2 billion worldwide streams, and its Spotify count has continued climbing since, cited at over 1.97 billion in a January 2026 retrospective. Across formats the song is routinely described in press coverage as a “billion-plus stream” phenomenon, a framing Powfu's own live-show promotional materials repeat.
Powfu is consistently described in music press as a foundational figure in bringing lo-fi hip-hop, and its melancholic “sad rap” or “sad boi” subgenre, from a niche YouTube and SoundCloud phenomenon into the commercial mainstream. Faber himself describes “Death Bed” as lo-fi hip-hop, explaining that the term refers to “unpolished” beats often sourced from unknown producers on YouTube or SoundCloud, layered with a “mumbled, monotone” rap delivery that lets words “melt into each other,” reinforcing an overall melancholy mood, a style journalists have dubbed “emo sad boi music for Gen Z.”
Apple Music's editorial biography frames Powfu as “raised in pop-punk” via his father's band while simultaneously being “a product of the SoundCloud-rap generation,” blending Blink-182-inspired melodic hooks with “a sad-eyed conversational flow and atmospheric lo-fi bedroom beats.” Powfu has described his sound in different interviews as “alternative punk lo-fi hip-hop” and has emphasized that his direction has increasingly folded in punk-rock textures atop his core lo-fi instrumentals. Lyrically, his catalog leans heavily on loneliness, heartbreak and interior emotional narrative. In an interview with The Guardian, reported via Louder, Faber said: “I was pretty lonely when I started making music. I'd just stay at home, I didn't really hang out with friends, so I feel like a lot of people that listened to it were in the same boat.”
A student-press retrospective from Liberty University's WINGSPAN traces distinct stylistic phases across his catalog: the early Some Boring Love Stories EPs are “heavily lo-fi focused” with muffled audio and simple acoustic guitar and piano instrumentation, while Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents pushes toward a more rap-rock centered style, and his more recent albums combine the prominent lo-fi beats of his early work with the electric guitar of his 2022 record, alongside newer Christian-themed material the piece connects to what it calls his emerging “spot as a worship artist.” Powfu has also described dabbling in “indie pop music on the side,” which he calls “probably like the weirdest stuff” he makes.
Powfu is an unusually prolific artist, having self-released dozens of EPs, singles and albums since 2018 in addition to his major-label output. His studio albums include Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents (December 2, 2022), his first full-length, released via Powfu Productions/Columbia and featuring a punk-rock cover of Taylor Swift's “Mine”; Verses That Never Surfaced (demos) (February 1, 2023); Gathered by the Lantern (October 6, 2023); The Fleeting Life of a Fool (May 4, 2024); and Mafia and Mugs Rootbeer (October 4, 2024), the latter three all independent releases via Powfu Productions.
His extended-play catalog runs from the original independent Some Boring Love Stories series, Pts. 1 through 5 (December 2018 to November 2020), through Letters You Never Received (July 2019), his Columbia/Robots + Humans debut Poems of the Past (May 2020, home to “Death Bed”), Drinking Under the Streetlights (June 2021), the three-part Tell Me Your Feelings and I Won't Tell You Mine series (October 2021, March 2023, November 2024), the collaborative Flooding the Gates EP with fellow lo-fi artists Ouse and Snøw (June 2023), and The Life of a Lofi Boy (June 29, 2025), released via Lofi Records, the label associated with the “Lofi Girl” YouTube brand, marking that label's first-ever release to feature vocals.
Key singles as lead artist include “Letters in December” (with Rxseboy, 2019), “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” featuring beabadoobee (2020), “I'm Used to It” (2020), “17again” (2020), “When the Hospital Was My Home” (with Rxseboy, 2020), “The Way That You See Me” (with Rxseboy and Sarcastic Sounds, featuring Ayleen Valentine, 2021), “The Long Way Home” (with Sarcastic Sounds and Sara Kays, 2021), “Mario Kart” (with Travis Barker on drums, 2021), “Losing Sleep” (with Dvbbs, 2021), “I Hate Waking Up” (with Rxseboy, SadBoyProlific and Alek Olsen, 2022), “Fault in the Stars” (with The Chainsmokers, 2023), and “Beautiful as Ever” (with Forrest Frank and Nextseasons, 2024). Key features as a guest artist include “When We Were 16” (Rxseboy featuring Mishaal and Powfu, 2019), “Contigo” (BoyWithUke featuring Powfu, 2022), and “Don't Ever Think Twice” (Skinny Atlas featuring Powfu, 2025).
Wikipedia's discography section lists 19 total album- and EP-level releases under his name, while retailer databases such as Qobuz index between 60 and 76 individual release entries once singles, remixes and territory variants are counted separately. Sony Music Canada's December 2022 press release for Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents stated that, to that point, Powfu had accumulated over 1.2 billion US streams and nearly 900 million video views across a catalog of nine EPs.
“Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” is Powfu's only Hot 100 entry and by far his most commercially significant song. Its US Billboard Hot 100 peak is No. 23, a figure confirmed by Wikipedia's dedicated song page, The New York Times, and multiple chart-history archives. Per fan-maintained chart-run records, the song spent 29 weeks on the Hot 100, entering around No. 33 and climbing steadily to its peak, a trajectory typical of slow-building streaming and TikTok-driven hits rather than a first-week blockbuster. The single also reached No. 43 on the Billboard Global 200, No. 19 on the US Adult Pop Airplay chart, and No. 1 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in June 2020, Powfu's first entry to top a Billboard genre chart. His debut EP, Poems of the Past, topped Billboard's Heatseekers chart on the strength of the Mark Hoppus remix feature.
Internationally, the song performed even better than at home: it hit No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, No. 5 in Canada, No. 5 in New Zealand, No. 7 in Australia and Ireland, and No. 1 in Malaysia and Singapore, charting top-20 in numerous other territories and reaching the Top 10 in no fewer than 17 countries per Apple Music's editorial write-up. Certifications include 5× Platinum in Canada, 2× Platinum in the UK, 3× Platinum in Australia, 4× Platinum in New Zealand, 5× Platinum in the US, Platinum in Denmark, Diamond in France, and Gold in Belgium.
None of Powfu's subsequent singles or albums have replicated “Death Bed”'s chart or streaming scale. His post-2020 output remains commercially durable within the lo-fi and streaming ecosystem, drawing millions of monthly Spotify listeners across his catalog, but has not returned to the Hot 100.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Billboard Hot 100 peak (“Death Bed”) | No. 23 (29 weeks charted) |
| UK Singles Chart peak | No. 4 |
| Spotify streams (“Death Bed,” cited Jan. 2026) | approx. 1.98 billion |
| Peak monthly TikTok plays (March 2020) | approx. 4 billion |
| US RIAA certification | 5× Platinum |
| Career catalog streams (as of Dec. 2022, Sony Music Canada) | over 1.2 billion US streams |
Powfu's live career began notably later than his recorded output, since “Death Bed” broke during the COVID-19 pandemic when touring was impossible. He has said his stated goal for 2021 was “to work on music as much as I can, and go on tour.”
In 2022, per Sony Music Canada, Powfu “made his touring debut this year hitting several markets in North America.” In 2023 he mounted the Gathered by the Lantern Tour, his first-ever European run, supporting the album of the same name with support acts Cody Lawless and Ouse. The ten-date tour opened with a sold-out show in Amsterdam on September 23 and included sold-out stops in Munich and Milan, plus dates in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin, concluding in Dublin on October 7. Setlist archives from that run confirm performances of “Dead Eyes,” “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head),” “Mine,” and a live tribute track, “A Castle By The Sea (Tribute to Natasha).”
In spring 2026, Powfu launched “Powfu Presents: The Lofi Library Tour,” a North American run confirmed across multiple ticketing platforms running roughly April 7 through May 10, with dates including Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Durham, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Cambridge/Boston, Montreal (with support from Jomie and Kid E$s), Toronto, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Chicago, Madison, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Vancouver. Despite the tour's branding, it plays conventional independent venues and clubs rather than literal libraries, the “Lofi Library” name reading as a thematic reference to lo-fi's “study beats” aesthetic.
The featured vocalist on “Death Bed” is beabadoobee (Beatrice Laus), whose sampled 2017 song “Coffee” catalyzed Powfu's breakout. Born June 3, 2000, in Iloilo City, Philippines, and raised in west London, she signed to independent UK label Dirty Hit in 2018, with Dirty Hit co-founder Jamie Oborne also becoming her manager. “Death Bed” became her first-ever charting single, locally and internationally, well before her own solo albums charted at similar heights. She has since released three studio albums, Fake It Flowers (2020), Beatopia (2022), and This Is How Tomorrow Moves (2024, produced with Rick Rubin, her first UK No. 1), and has toured as support for The 1975, Clairo and Halsey. No evidence points to further direct collaboration, joint touring, or an ongoing creative relationship between Powfu and beabadoobee since 2020; their connection is a single, highly consequential transaction rather than a continuing partnership.
Rxseboy (Anthony Tubbs, born December 19, 1999) is one of Powfu's most frequent early collaborators and a fellow architect of the SoundCloud-era lo-fi rap scene. His feature on Powfu's “When the Hospital Was My Home” and his own “When We Were 16” (featuring Powfu and Mishaal, approximately 40 million Spotify streams) are among his most-streamed collaborative tracks. Rxseboy later pivoted toward indie pop, which he calls “rxsepop,” in 2023, while continuing lo-fi releases under the alter ego “sorrow.”
Sarcastic Sounds is a recurring collaborator and producer or songwriter across Powfu's catalog, credited on “The Way That You See Me” (with Rxseboy, featuring Ayleen Valentine, 2021), “The Long Way Home” (with Sara Kays, 2021), “Some Nights” (Jomie featuring Sarcastic Sounds, Rxseboy and Powfu, 2020), “How to Live” (yaeow featuring Powfu and Sarcastic Sounds, 2021), and “Hold Somebody” (guccihighwaters featuring Sarcastic Sounds and Powfu, 2020). Sarcastic Sounds is also credited as a songwriter and producer on the Christian Gates track “Never with You Again,” alongside Christian Gates, Elation and Slush Puppy, released March 24, 2023 as part of the Why Do I Hear Breathing? EP. Elation is credited elsewhere in Christian Gates's catalog as his most frequent producer, which makes “Never with You Again” a documented meeting point between Powfu's lo-fi-rap collaborator circle and Christian Gates's core production team, even though no direct collaboration between Powfu and Christian Gates has surfaced in available sources. More broadly, Powfu remains one of the clearest historical anchors of the sad-rap and lo-fi-hip-hop microgenre, a scene whose demographic and aesthetic footprint runs adjacent to, without directly overlapping, the guitar-driven “sad boy” and alt-pop scene that includes acts such as Ekkstacy, Mareux, Isaac Dunbar and Olivver the Kid.
Other frequent collaborators across Powfu's catalog include Ouse and Snøw (co-billed on the 2023 EP Flooding the Gates), Jomie and Skinny Atlas (recurring features across his 2024 and 2025 releases), SadBoyProlific, Tia Tia, Shalfi, Alec Benjamin, Dvbbs, May-A, guccihighwaters, Travis Barker (drums on “Mario Kart,” 2021), Blink-182's Mark Hoppus (remix feature on Poems of the Past), The Chainsmokers (“Fault in the Stars,” 2023), and contemporary Christian and gospel artist Forrest Frank (“Beautiful as Ever,” 2024, and “Pray For Me”).
Powfu operates through a hybrid independent-and-major structure. His own imprint, Powfu Productions (styled “PowPow” on his earliest 2018 and 2019 EPs), has served as the primary release vehicle for nearly his entire catalog, frequently released under exclusive license to Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In the UK, his early Columbia-era material was co-released via Robots + Humans. His most recent album cycle, from 2023 to 2024, shows a partial return to independence, with Gathered by the Lantern, The Fleeting Life of a Fool and Mafia and Mugs Rootbeer credited solely to Powfu Productions rather than Columbia, and his 2025 EP The Life of a Lofi Boy was released via Lofi Records, the label associated with the “Lofi Girl” YouTube and streaming brand. TikTok separately struck a music licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment, Powfu's label, that gave the platform's users access to Sony's full catalog, including Powfu's back catalog, further compounding his streaming numbers after the initial viral wave.
On the personal-management side, Powfu is managed by his father, Dave Faber of Faber Drive, a direct-family management arrangement that is unusual in a major-label pop context and one both have described publicly, including in the 2026 interview “How to Build a Billion-Stream Music Brand from Your Bedroom.”
Powfu's 2024 to 2026 period reflects continued high-volume release activity, deepening ties to the broader “lofi” scene's other key brands, and an emerging Christian-music thread in his output. In 2024 he released two full albums, The Fleeting Life of a Fool (May 4) and Mafia and Mugs Rootbeer (October 4), plus the EP Tell Me Your Feelings, I Won't Tell You Mine, Pt. 3 (November 1, independent release). He also released “Beautiful as Ever” with contemporary Christian and gospel artist Forrest Frank and Nextseasons (May 2024), part of a pattern a student-press retrospective connected to his albums “incorporat[ing] some Christian songs, developing Powfu's spot as a worship artist.” He also appears on Forrest Frank's “Pray For Me.” Forrest Frank's own career accelerated dramatically in this period, his Jesus Generation Tour reportedly selling more than 470,000 tickets within 10 days of announcement in 2025 and 2026, playing arenas and stadiums including Madison Square Garden, positioning Powfu's collaboration with him as a link to one of contemporary Christian music's fastest-growing acts.
In January 2025 Powfu was featured on Skinny Atlas's single “Don't Ever Think Twice.” In June 2025 he released The Life of a Lofi Boy via Lofi Records, his collaboration with the “Lofi Girl” brand, marking that label's first vocal release and described as Powfu's personal tribute to the genre that launched his career. Through late 2025 and into 2026 he kept a steady cadence of singles, including “Run Fast,” “i'll keep protecting you,” “rotting with the moon,” “Arrietty,” “take you home,” “she want,” and “I can't navigate without you” (released around April 2026), alongside guest features like “hourglass” and “motion picture.” In spring 2026 he launched the North American “Powfu Presents: The Lofi Library Tour.” In January 2026, Louder and Yahoo published a lengthy retrospective revisiting the “Death Bed” origin story in detail, evidence of continued media interest in the song's legacy six years after release, and in February 2026 Powfu and his father and manager Dave Faber gave a joint long-form interview discussing songwriting process and career management.
Powfu's father, Dave Faber, fronted the Canadian pop-punk band Faber Drive, best known for the 2007 single “Tongue Tied,” signed to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger's label, 604 Records. Powfu learned to play drums at age two. “Death Bed” was originally uploaded without a cleared sample, meaning it could not be officially released for roughly a year despite already amassing tens of millions of plays, an unusual case of a song going viral in bootleg form before its legal release. The song's biggest single-month TikTok tally was reported at four billion plays in March 2020 alone. Mark Hoppus of Blink-182, one of Powfu's childhood musical heroes, recorded a guest verse for a bonus remix of “Death Bed” included on Poems of the Past. Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents (2022), Powfu's debut full-length album, includes a punk-rock cover of Taylor Swift's “Mine”; he told Billboard the album's title reflects his effort to identify “people who are fake or only want [him] for the wrong reasons.” Powfu won Best New Rock/Alternative Rock Artist at the 2021 iHeartRadio Music Awards and was nominated for Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the 2021 Juno Awards. His 2025 EP The Life of a Lofi Boy was released in direct partnership with Lofi Girl, the anime-girl-studying meme and brand behind one of YouTube's longest-running 24/7 livestreams, marking the first time that channel's label put out a release featuring vocals. A live setlist from his 2023 European tour included a personal tribute track, “A Castle By The Sea (Tribute to Natasha),” an apparent reference to his wife, Natasha Desiree, whom he married in 2021.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1999 | Isaiah Faber born March 31 in Vancouver, British Columbia; raised in Mission, B.C. |
| 2018 | Begins releasing music independently, starting the Some Boring Love Stories EP series. |
| Feb 2019 | Uploads “Death Bed” to SoundCloud and YouTube, built on an uncleared sample of beabadoobee's “Coffee.” |
| 2019–20 | Song goes viral via TikTok's “love confession” challenge; peaks at four billion TikTok plays in March 2020. |
| Feb 2020 | “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” commercially released, crediting beabadoobee; signs to Columbia Records. |
| May 2020 | Debut Columbia EP Poems of the Past released, including a Mark Hoppus remix feature. |
| 2021 | Wins Best New Rock/Alternative Rock Artist at the iHeartRadio Music Awards; nominated for Juno Breakthrough Artist of the Year; releases “Mario Kart” with Travis Barker on drums. |
| Jun 2021 | “Death Bed” surpasses 1 billion Spotify streams. |
| 2022 | Touring debut across North America; releases debut full-length album Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents. |
| 2023 | Gathered by the Lantern Tour, his first European run; releases Gathered by the Lantern and the collaborative EP Flooding the Gates. |
| 2024 | Releases The Fleeting Life of a Fool and Mafia and Mugs Rootbeer; collaborates with Forrest Frank on “Beautiful as Ever.” |
| 2025 | Features on Skinny Atlas's “Don't Ever Think Twice”; releases The Life of a Lofi Boy via Lofi Records. |
| 2026 | Launches “Powfu Presents: The Lofi Library Tour” across North America; gives joint interview with Dave Faber on career management. |
It is by far his most commercially significant song and his only US Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 23. His subsequent catalog has performed well within the lo-fi and streaming ecosystem, generating millions of monthly listeners, but no other single or album has returned him to the Hot 100.
Powfu built “Death Bed” around a sample of beabadoobee's 2017 song “Coffee,” found via a producer's instrumental on SoundCloud in February 2019, without initially clearing the sample. Once the song went viral and the sample was cleared roughly a year later, the commercial release credited beabadoobee as a featured artist, and it became her first-ever charting single anywhere in the world.
Both. His imprint, Powfu Productions, has released nearly all of his catalog, often under exclusive license to Columbia Records. His 2023-2024 albums returned to full independence under Powfu Productions alone, and his 2025 EP was released via Lofi Records, the label tied to the “Lofi Girl” YouTube brand.
The two have not directly collaborated. The link runs through a shared collaborator: Sarcastic Sounds, who is credited on multiple Powfu tracks, also co-wrote and co-produced the Christian Gates song “Never with You Again” alongside Christian Gates's frequent producer Elation, released in March 2023 on the Why Do I Hear Breathing? EP.
His father, Dave Faber, formerly the frontman of the pop-punk band Faber Drive, manages his career directly, a relationship both have discussed in joint interviews.
| Year | Release | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Poems of the Past | EP (Columbia/Robots + Humans) |
| 2021 | Drinking Under the Streetlights | EP |
| 2022 | Surrounded by Hounds and Serpents | Studio album |
| 2023 | Gathered by the Lantern | Studio album |
| 2023 | Flooding the Gates | EP (with Ouse and Snøw) |
| 2024 | The Fleeting Life of a Fool | Studio album |
| 2024 | Mafia and Mugs Rootbeer | Studio album |
| 2025 | The Life of a Lofi Boy | EP (Lofi Records) |
Further reading on adjacent artists and scenes: beabadoobee's own solo catalog, built on Dirty Hit and now including a Rick Rubin-produced UK No. 1; Travis Barker's wide-ranging session and drumming credits across pop and rock; and Christian Gates and Elation, whose “Never with You Again” sits at a documented crossing point between Christian Gates's core production team and Powfu's lo-fi-rap collaborator circle via Sarcastic Sounds.