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Even at his most vulnerable, Pink Sweat$ sounds unshaken. The Philly singer/songwriter stretches the bounds of R&B with a quiet fearlessness, sliding into synth-funk in one moment, and acoustic strumming in the next. Raised religious, he didn’t listen to secular music until he was well into his teens. As a result, the stripped-down, dreamy pop-soul of his early <I>Volume</I> EPs feels as fresh as his lyrics about love feel honest—both informed by a sense of real-time emotional growth. With a lush coo that swerves into flashy falsetto at a moment’s notice (see 2018’s utterly naked “Honesty”), Pink Sweat$ shares a comfy confidence with his namesake.
About Pink Sweat$
Hometown
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Born
February 14, 1992
Genre
R&B/Soul
Growing up, R&B singer-songwriter David Bowden, a.k.a. Pink Sweat$, got the strange feeling that he couldn’t swallow. It started happening more, and more severely. Within a few years, he couldn’t even keep down a sip of water. It turned out to be a rare esophageal condition called achalasia. He had surgery and bounced back, but the experience lit a fire: He was going to speak his heart whether people listened or not.
Raised in West Philadelphia, Bowden spent his young life in an intensely religious community, hearing almost no secular music until he was in his late teens. Eventually he caught on to Maroon 5, Avril Lavigne, 50 Cent, and, in particular, Kanye West—an artist who, like Sweat$, embraces the conventions of his genre while also gently subverting them. (He has said that he stylizes his name “Sweat$” because he thinks money is important, but it isn’t the only thing, and doesn’t come first.)
After starting to make some headway as a songwriter, Sweat$ decided to become a performer—a shift he attributes, in part, to feeling too attached to his music to let it go. He released his first project, Volume 1, in late 2018, and followed it up with 2019's Volume 2—each one a sparse, pretty, beat-free R&B EP in the vein of slightly left-of-center crooners like Frank Ocean, SZA, and Khalid. “I had to take a big look at the kind of music I had been working on,” the Apple Music Up Next honoree said to Beats 1 host Zane Lowe about his bouncy, laidback, mostly acoustic style. “I'm just trying to expand people's palates for black music. That's as blunt as I can put it.”
Raised in West Philadelphia, Bowden spent his young life in an intensely religious community, hearing almost no secular music until he was in his late teens. Eventually he caught on to Maroon 5, Avril Lavigne, 50 Cent, and, in particular, Kanye West—an artist who, like Sweat$, embraces the conventions of his genre while also gently subverting them. (He has said that he stylizes his name “Sweat$” because he thinks money is important, but it isn’t the only thing, and doesn’t come first.)
After starting to make some headway as a songwriter, Sweat$ decided to become a performer—a shift he attributes, in part, to feeling too attached to his music to let it go. He released his first project, Volume 1, in late 2018, and followed it up with 2019's Volume 2—each one a sparse, pretty, beat-free R&B EP in the vein of slightly left-of-center crooners like Frank Ocean, SZA, and Khalid. “I had to take a big look at the kind of music I had been working on,” the Apple Music Up Next honoree said to Beats 1 host Zane Lowe about his bouncy, laidback, mostly acoustic style. “I'm just trying to expand people's palates for black music. That's as blunt as I can put it.”
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