lilyisthatyou

A viral single, a major label, and the exit

lilyisthatyou is the working name of Lily Davies, a pop songwriter from Toronto who now works out of Los Angeles. The way in was FMRN, a blunt, sex-positive single that spread on TikTok and did what viral singles are meant to do — it brought a major label. Davies signed with Warner Records and released her first EP, The Character, under that arrangement: a set of songs each built around a different invented figure, a different kind of person to be for three minutes.

She is independent again now, and the change reads across everything since. The subject matter has stayed roughly where it began — sex, power, who is allowed to want what, and who gets punished for saying so — but the framing has shifted from arch to unguarded. Billboard Canada's profile of her puts the provocation at the centre of the work rather than treating it as a marketing angle, which is fair: the writing has always been more interested in the aftermath of a decision than in the decision itself.

What the label years bought her was a working method and a fanbase that arrived faster than the infrastructure to hold it. What leaving bought her was the ability to put out three projects in under two years without waiting for anyone's sign-off.

Lilith, dirt, and the point where the characters stopped

The LILITH EP set up an alter ego — a stage self, more capable and less apologetic than the writer behind it. It was a useful device and a limited one, and the record that followed started dismantling it.

DIRT ON MY HANDS, a six-track EP reviewed at the end of April 2026, is the loudest thing she has made. The production is bass-forward and deliberately unsmoothed, with pop-punk edges pushed up against electronic textures; SICK PUPPY, DOG IN ME and HEART OF DARKNESS carry the record's temperature. The critical read at the time was that Davies is good at a specific and unglamorous job — turning what one reviewer called 'unpretty' emotions into hooks that stick — and that the deliberate abrasiveness was a choice rather than a budget constraint.

Then came the turn. EMPTY UNIVERSE arrived on 26 June 2026, a song about wanting someone to confirm that you matter while knowing perfectly well that you would survive without it. On 24 July she released MONEY CAN'T BUY HAPPINESS with a video and announced the EP it belongs to, FROM THE GARDEN I GREW, out 21 August 2026. The single was produced by Albin Tengblad, whose credits include work with BANKS and Keke Palmer, and it started as a studio joke about a $350,000 crocodile Birkin — the hook is written to be readable in two opposite directions depending on what the listener already believes about money.

Davies has been direct about what changed. The new material, in her words, is 'just Lilyisthatyou. An honest, very, very raw, honest, confident … pretty heartbreaking at times, person.' She has described the chapter as her most self-assured and cohesive, and the through-line she gave for the EP is plainer still: 'To create something beautiful — a flower, a garden — you need to get your hands dirty.' The two EPs are meant to be heard as a pair, the mess and then what grew out of it.

The Garden

The fanbase has a name, and it came from a room rather than from a marketing meeting. On her first headline tour, which opened in 2024 in Boston, the audience surprised her on stage with flowers. The gesture stuck, the crowd became The Garden, and the imagery has since worked its way into the record titles and the name of the current tour.

That origin matters for how the shows run. The flowers are not a bit that the production team introduced; they are something the audience started and now maintains, which changes what happens at the barrier. It also explains why an artist whose loudest record is called DIRT ON MY HANDS is touring under the banner THE FLOWERS HAVE FEELINGS — the two ideas are the same idea seen from either end.

Two years of stages, club and field

The live record before this autumn is a steady climb through mid-size rooms and Canadian festival bills. The Euphoria Tour ran through spring 2025 with 13-song sets — Das Werk in Vienna on 26 April, La Boule Noire in Paris on 2 May — and the summer that followed put her on outdoor stages at home: the Coca-Cola Stage at the Calgary Stampede on 5 July 2025, the River Stage at Ottawa Bluesfest on 17 July with a 6.15pm slot, and the CNE Bandshell in Toronto on 26 August. She closed the year at Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík on 7 November 2025.

The festival sets are compressed versions of the club show — eight songs at the Stampede, opening with Fool and taking in FMRN and ALL ABOUT ME before a cover of The Neighbourhood's Sweater Weather. Across everything logged so far, the three most-played songs are ALL ABOUT ME, FMRN and Another One Down, which tells you the shape of the encore territory even as the newer EPs push into the body of the set.

The venues on the current routing are the same class of room, which is the honest state of the career: Manchester Academy 3, Oslo in Hackney, Bottom Lounge in Chicago, The Atlantis in Washington. These are the sizes where a headline tour either converts a streaming audience into a touring one or does not.

Where it stands, September 2026

FROM THE GARDEN I GREW has been out for under three weeks. The tour that carries it opens on 19 September at Klub Hybrydy in Warsaw and has not played a note yet, so there are no reviews of it — anything written about how this show lands is guesswork until the Warsaw date happens.

What is confirmed is the scale. It is billed as her largest headline run to date: 38 concerts across eight countries on the current schedule, with 23 dates on sale at the time of writing, a ten-show European and UK leg through late September, a North American leg from early October, and five Canadian dates in November finishing at the Mod Club in Toronto on 28 November. James the Seventh is the main support, listed on a portion of the routing.

One production detail has been confirmed in advance and is worth flagging because it is a first: this tour includes choreography, which none of her previous runs did. For an artist whose live reputation has been built on proximity and crowd volume rather than on staging, that is a real change of approach, and the Warsaw and Berlin dates will be the first evidence of whether it fits the songs.