This 16 Year Old Is A Viral Sensation You Didn’t Know Was Irish
More and more, we are seeing Irish artists skip the domestic scene and are becoming premium exports in the global music world before we’ve even had a chance to get an ear to them. The likes of Sign Crushes Motorist, Deathtoricky most recently and artists such as Rejjie Snow, EDEN and Sega Bodega further back have constantly been paired with the statement “Wait, they’re Irish?”. The newest addition to this list is Eric Earl. Under his moniker ‘proderics’, he has crafted a sound that has captured the psyche of a generation.
“I started making music in early 2024. I taught myself how to use garageband and would make a new beat every evening, then I dropped my first song in march of that year.”
Some wait for years for that first hit to come. For some, it just never comes to fruition. For Eric, it was just too easy. After a few months of honing skills on free software, such as GarageBand, he began to exchange his work within Discord servers. He submitted one particular beat into a server and received a reply from the 21-year-old Philadelphia native, melodybloom. The two had never spoken before, however Earl accepted melody’s request to sing on the track. “I had virtually no communication with her after that,” Eric said, “until the song blew up”.
The track in question is titled ‘strangers’ and sees proderics’ drum-heavy production as a backing to the dreamy yet melancholic vocals of melodybloom. Little did the pair know that this track would soon become one of the biggest sounds on TikTok, soundtracking a generation’s inner-pensivity and garnering billions of views in the meantime.
“People started lip syncing and making edits to my song. Every time I would open the app the sound had another 100 uses, that’s when I knew it was gonna blow.”
Not even legally able to hold a driving license, proderics had produced one of the most viral songs of the year, almost by accident. As it stands, all variations of ‘strangers’ harbours over 300,000 videos on TikTok alone. This has seen Eric skyrocket to over three million monthly listeners on Spotify, with ‘Strangers’ sitting at 86 million streams on Spotify alone. This is all whilst still in the infancy of his career.
“It was overwhelming at times, especially early on. I had no idea what I was doing. Music was a hobby for me and not something I was doing that often.”
The blowup has been so intense that Eric and melody had not even met until less than a week ago, ironically rendering them strangers. It’s a lot for a young lad who didn’t even have music at the forefront of his mind. “It was overwhelming at times, especially early on. I had no idea what I was doing, music was a hobby for me and not something I was doing that often. Then all of a sudden I had an expectation to make more, I felt like i had to follow up on the success of strangers. I had to start making TikToks to promote the song, and I’d never even posted myself on social media before. So that was quite scary, but it’s a lot less stressful now.”
Since his first track, Eric has released six other singles, which have been received well. The future is bright for Ireland’s newest viral sensation. “I just wanna keep making good music, collaborate with cool people, and see it find its audience.”
