Skye Daru Is Ready to Be Seen Again With “Welcome to the Disco”

The model, computer scientist, writer, and musician has never followed a single path. Now, after years away from releasing music, she is finding her way back to her first love.

When Skye Daru wrote Welcome to the Disco, she had no plans to release it.

Sitting in the basement of her childhood home while visiting her parents, the creative polymath was merely trying to answer a question she had carried for years. “I sat down one day and thought, ‘What kind of music do I actually want to make at this time in my life?’” Daru recalls. The answer wasn’t necessarily classical or the industry-manufactured pop she had been trained to write as a teenager. Instead, she retraced her steps to the sound she had grown up listening to: old-school R&B, love ballads, and disco, from Prince and Michael Jackson to Luther Vandross.

She recorded the song, saved it to her laptop, and moved on. Unknowingly, it became the catalyst for her comeback.

Earlier this year, Daru began posting snippets of old songs on TikTok. It was not initially a rollout or even a serious attempt to relaunch her music career, but simply something she did for fun and as an “exercise for myself to be seen again.” But when she shared Welcome to the Disco, a combustion-like reaction occurred. People began reposting the song, dancing to it, and using it as a backing track. Producers reached out through TikTok, including Izzy Perri, who helped develop the original demo into the finished track.

“I didn’t want to release any music this year, to be quite honest,” Daru says. “I wanted to take this time to just write and create and figure out my sound.” But the speed of the internet had other plans. “Once people hear something they like, they’re like, ‘drop it now, drop it immediately.’”

Raised in the suburbs of Illinois, Daru is 75 percent Filipino. Her mother was born in Manila, while her father is half Indian and half Filipino, with roots in Guimba, Nueva Ecija, a first-class agricultural town known for its production of rice, oyster mushrooms, grapes, onions, and field snails.

Daru grew up in a household where music was a universal language. Several of her aunts and uncles studied classical music, and she began learning how to strike keys on the piano as a youngster. Then came Alicia Keys and John Legend, who exemplified a different kind of occupation, where you could sing, compose, and make songs of your own. When lessons kept her rooted in Mozart and Beethoven, Daru taught herself instead. Eventually, her parents found a suitable teacher who let her explore jazz, pop, and classic rock.

“I sang everywhere I could,” she says. Family Christmases became impromptu concerts with her cousins, while school talent shows and karaoke machines offered her headlining slots to perform. Her earliest memory is the noughties classic I’m Like a Bird by Nelly Furtado, which she would make her father play repeatedly in the car.

Then, at 13, modeling entered the picture. Daru was signed by the prestigious modeling agency Ford, which launched the careers of supermodels such as Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Brooke Shields, Lauren Hutton and Barbara Palvin. Fifteen years later, it’s a career she continues to pursue. “It’s very young. I was a child, kind of thrust into an adult world,” she says.

She describes those teenage years as an “Asian Hannah Montana”: One day she would be attending AP classes, and the next, her parents would be taking her to Los Angeles for modeling jobs or studio sessions. Despite the unusual schedule, she maintained top grades while working professionally.

“I have always felt like I was straddling between all these different worlds,” she says. “Never having my two feet planted through one door, but always trying to balance all of it.”

Music and modeling eventually overlapped. A management company looking for models who could sing brought Daru into Ford Chicago, where she auditioned at just 13 by belting Guns N’ Roses. She subsequently entered artist development, recording songs that had originally been written for other artists, including material that had been pitched to Kelly Clarkson.

But Daru soon realized she wanted to write her own songs. “I actually want to pursue songwriting,” she remembers thinking. She began sending rough demos to her manager and producer, eventually releasing songs including Wild Side. She wrote Camouflage from the bunk bed of her model apartment around 2015 or 2016, and the song was later featured by Teen Vogue. “That was one of the first moments where I really felt like, I feel like a pop star is going to school and getting to do this. Like, this is so cool.”

Still, music was not the only part of Daru’s identity she wanted to explore. She entered NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music before switching to computer science and premed during her sophomore year. She graduated in 2020 with a degree in computer science on a premed track.

“I think at the time I was trying to figure out what a successful life looked like,” she says. “There was a lot of pressure too when you’re going to college and trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do for the next four years.”

After graduating during the pandemic, Daru entered the technology and consulting world. She also began anonymously publishing poetry and essays on Medium, where she eventually met her future husband, Vincenzo Elifani. Their relationship led her to Italy, where they spent three years living between Milan and Puglia.

Growing up in the United States, Daru believes she had absorbed the idea that “your value is very closely tied to what you can accomplish,” whether through work, success, or what appeared on a résumé. In the boot-shaped nation, she experienced a different rhythm of life. “There’s so much appreciation there for just being alive, for food, family, beauty, conversation, music, culture,” she says. “Life is something meant to be experienced and not just something to accomplish.”

“I was in the most beautiful place, but there was something still missing,” she says. “There was an itch that I needed to scratch still.” That realization eventually brought Daru to Los Angeles, where she has spent the past year reconnecting with her creative side. Witnessing her husband pursue his own creative work also became a daily reminder of what she had left behind. “I was like, there’s, I don’t know why I put music aside all this time,” she says.

Now,Welcome to the Disco is giving her the chance to do so.

The accompanying music video, directed by Daru’s younger brother, salutes the dance-show era of the 1970s, with Skye styled as a modern-day Cher. Hunter Daru, a model and filmmaker who co-founded Hat Studios to tell underrepresented stories, had previously directed his sister’s wedding video, which went viral on TikTok with over seven million views.

For the new video, the siblings scoured vintage stores around Los Angeles for clothes and created a world centred on nostalgia and self-expression. Filipino ballet dancer Troy Untalan appears as the main dancer, while friends and collaborators from Daru’s modelling career joined the cast.

“I wanted to basically recreate, or pay homage to, the likes of Soul Train,” Daru says. “A feeling of coming as you are and just getting in a room and dancing and feeling alive.”

The song is only the beginning. Daru is already working on new material, with hopes of eventually releasing an EP that explores funk, disco, and Italo disco from her time abroad. She dreams of collaborating with artists such as Bruno Mars, Dabeull, and Dijon. But for now, though, she’s giving herself the freedom to discover the artist she wants to become.

Undoubtedly, TikTok has helped her get there. “Had you asked me this time last year if I would be putting a song out, putting a music video out, and starting to perform again, I would say no,” she says. Yet this global tool has evolved into something more. It has become a way to inhabit and remain present in a third space. “I think that, paired with me reading The Artist’s Way (by Julia Cameron) over the past year and just learning to be okay with being seen again and just having more fun,” she says.

After years of shapeshifting through different iterations of herself, Daru finally allows them all to exist in the same room and turns the music back up, full blast.

Skye Daru’s Welcome to the Disco premieres on August 21, 2026.