Dutch Melrose

A songwriting degree in London, a career built back in Los Angeles

Dutch Melrose is the recording name of Josh Harms, credited on his own songs as Joshua Zachary Harms. He grew up in the greater Los Angeles area and went to La Cañada High School, then left for London to take a BA in songwriting at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance before coming home to work as a full-time writer, producer and engineer out of Burbank and Studio City. The school still carries him as one of its success stories, and the training shows in how he talks about the job: the melody is the thing, and everything else exists to carry it.

The public catalogue opens in 2018 with "Because It Mattered", and the first release of any size was After Hours, self-released in 2019. ICMP's own spotlight page marked the moment "Home", taken from that record, was added to Spotify's New Music Friday playlist in the United States — the first outside push the project got. What followed was not an album cycle but half a decade of singles, which suited an audience that was arriving through short-form video rather than through record shops or radio.

RUNRUNRUN, and the readers who adopted it

The song that changed the scale of the project is RUNRUNRUN, released in 2022 and co-produced with Collin Idzikowski. It performed solidly on release and then had a second, much larger life when the BookTok community attached it to Zade Meadows, a character from H. D. Carlton's Haunting Adeline, and made it an unofficial theme. That is the kind of afterlife no release plan can manufacture, and it reset the size of the audience rather than simply adding to it.

Harms had already worked out how to keep the value of that sort of virality. Unofficial sped-up and slowed edits of popular songs were siphoning plays away from the originals, so he started issuing his own: Slowed + Reverb, Pt. 1 arrived in October 2021, the compilation Dutch Melrose (Sped Up Versions), Pt. 1 followed in 2023, and since then nearly every single has gone out in three forms — the original, a sped-up version and a slowed-and-reverbed one. The sped-up RUNRUNRUN alone accounts for a substantial block of the catalogue's plays.

The cumulative numbers are the reason a tour of this size was viable at all. ICMP puts the project past 750 million streams across platforms, averaging just under a million streams a day, with more than 2.5 billion views across social platforms; his Spotify monthly listener count sits at roughly 3.6 million. None of that came with a major label behind it.

MADKID Records, and owning the whole thing

Harms founded and runs MADKID Records, an independent label based in Los Angeles, and his summary of the operation is flat and unsentimental: "Everything I've done has been fully independent, from funding releases and marketing to running paid media campaigns at scale and managing my own catalogue ownership and publishing." He self-manages, hiring people to work for him rather than reporting to a manager, distributes through DistroKid, and owns his catalogue and publishing outright.

The visual side is handled the same way. He directs, edits and colours his own music videos, which is why the output has a single look across dozens of releases rather than whatever a commissioned director brought that month. He also runs his own paid media, which is the unglamorous machinery underneath the virality — a songwriter who can read a cost-per-view report is a rarer thing than a songwriter who can write a hook.

The one long-standing creative partnership outside his own operation is with Alex Nobile, a fellow ICMP alumnus, who co-wrote "Honey" and "FORGET YOU".

Where the catalogue stands in 2026

The release pace through the current cycle has been relentless. ANGEL, MIRROR MIRROR and FORGET YOU carried 2025; DIRTY LITTLE FIEND, TAKE ME, WILD, LOVE ME and HONEY have come through 2026. The most recent release is the two-track single THE REAL THING, issued on 7 August 2026, three days after the tour opened — timing that says a good deal about how the touring and the release schedule are being run as one operation.

The collaborations map the edges of the sound. "Jennifer's Body", with PLVTINUM and Chris Grey, came out in 2023 on Rebellion Records and did a lot to widen Grey's audience. His one Monstercat appearance was as featured vocalist on "Souvenir" by Whales in 2021. He has also guested on Hot Intent and Sorry Not Jomari's "HUNDO" and Restless Modern's "2 Loves". The most consequential partnership, though, is with benny mayne, with whom he recorded "PRETTY PLEASE" and "RUSH" — and who is now on the road with him.

The billing for the current run calls it a blend of dark alternative pop and soulful R&B, which is closer to the truth than any single genre tag. The writing is built around obsession, heartbreak and a kind of stylised menace, delivered with production that leans cinematic rather than raw.

The Heartbreak Hotel Tour

The run opened on 4 August 2026 at The Rebel Lounge in Phoenix and moved through Soundwell in Salt Lake City on 6 August, Meow Wolf Denver on 8 August, AM/FM in Dallas on 11 August, Subterranean in Chicago's Wicker Park on 14 August and Baby's All Right in Brooklyn on 18 August. After a month's gap it resumed at Brick and Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco on 17 September, doors at seven and music at eight, with Pretty Havoc added to the bill alongside benny mayne; tickets there were $38.91 and sales closed before the date.

What remains is the Los Angeles finish: two nights at The Peppermint Club in West Hollywood, on 24 and 25 September 2026, both starting at 7pm, with tickets from $35.25. Live Nation's artist page lists those two shows as the only ones still on sale, which makes the West Hollywood pair the end of the cycle rather than a mid-tour stop. Chicago tickets went on general sale on 1 May, giving the routing roughly three months of runway.

The venues are the point. These are 300-to-600-capacity clubs, booked for an artist whose streaming numbers would, in an earlier industry, have implied theatres. That gap is what an independent career looks like in practice: enormous reach through the phone, a deliberately modest first headline footprint on the ground, and no label underwriting the difference.