There’s a moment in “Julia” where Dave Curl sings that what’s important can’t be seen. It’s a line borrowed straight from The Little Prince, and it doubles as a mission statement for the Swiss singer-songwriter’s whole approach to music. His new acoustic dream-pop single, out August 12, came from a chance meeting at a surf camp in Portugal, the kind of fleeting encounter most people forget by the time they’ve flown home. Curl built a song around it instead.
If you’re meeting Curl for the first time through “Julia,” it’s a good place to start. The track is folk-pop-rock with an alternative edge, but here he leans into something softer and more floating than his earlier work. Peaceful guitar, a bass line that moves without ever crowding the vocal, and a delivery that sounds like a guy telling you about someone he met rather than performing at you. The lyrics paint Julia as a figure in the water, floating on a summer breeze, radiating like a rainbow. It’s dreamy without tipping into precious, and that balance is the thing Curl has gotten good at over two decades of writing.
This isn’t the first time he’s turned an ordinary moment into something that sticks. His single “Angel,” released in November 2022 as the first taste of his EP Hold Me Close, grew out of a train journey on a dark November evening and an unexpected encounter along the way. He called it a song for travelers and dreamers, and the same instinct runs through “Julia.” Curl keeps finding songs in the places most people just pass through, coffee shops, train rides, a surf camp on the Portuguese coast. The trick is that he actually notices, and then he does the work of shaping what he noticed into something other people can feel.
The visuals match the mood. “Julia” was filmed in Fuerteventura, and the accompanying lyric video, which went live August 5, is a cinematic piece built around the island’s volcanic terrain. Curl appears in a white shirt, seated among arid brown-and-ochre hills, playing acoustic guitar and mostly facing the landscape instead of the camera. Drone footage follows the contours of the ridges and ravines, coastal and underwater shots drift in, and double exposures blend him into the scenery for a hazy effect. The editing stays slow and understated, all long takes and gentle dissolves, warm low light and pale blue skies. There’s a lot of open space in the frame, and a small human figure keeps turning up inside a very large landscape. It suits a song about how a single moment can feel enormous in memory.
Curl’s story is worth knowing, if only because it explains why the songs feel unhurried. He’s a Swiss artist with English-Australian roots, born and raised in Switzerland, and he’s been writing and performing his own material for over twenty years. The decision to give music real room in his life crystallized during a volunteer stint as a gardener on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is a fairly unlikely origin point for a Swiss folk-pop record. His music has been streamed more than 2 million times and landed in over 2,000 Spotify playlists, and he still sounds a little surprised by those numbers when he mentions them.
The catalogue behind him is real. His 2021 debut album, Introducing, gathered his earlier songs into one intimate collection, including an acoustic take on “These Days.” The 2022 EP Slave To Instinct dug into obsession, false friends, the darker corners of the internet, and gender identity, and its title track picked up airplay on independent radio in Germany and beyond. There’s also “Serenity,” a 2023 song about letting go of someone, which remains his most popular. He’s played more than 200 shows across the range you’d expect from an independent artist doing it all himself, living-room concerts and weddings on one end, festival headline slots on the other. He runs his own website, films in odd places like a medieval watchtower on the Portuguese cliffs, and handles the label-and-tour-manager duties that come with being a genuine one-man operation.
What he says he wants from all of it is simple. He hopes listeners walk away with something like inspiration, a reminder to look at people and moments with the heart rather than just the eyes. It’s the Little Prince idea again, the one stitched into “Julia” itself. Whether or not you catch the reference, the song works on its own terms as a small, sincere thing made carefully.
That’s the throughline in Curl’s work, and it’s what “Julia” circles back to. The songs that last tend to be the ones written for the right reasons, not the ones built for an algorithm. Curl has spent twenty years quietly proving the point, one train ride and surf camp at a time.
You can find “Julia” and the rest at his website, and follow along on Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify. You can pre-save the single ahead of its August 12 release.
