Dean Lewis’ songwriting journey began, as they all do, with bedroom acoustic sessions and open mic nights. However, things took a dramatic turn when he leapt into the public consciousness after his debut single, ‘Waves’, appeared in teen TV hit Riverdale. Lewis says the track took him from zero to hero almost instantly.

"It was crazy!” reflects the Aussie singer. “‘Waves’ came and did nothing. No one cared for like three months. Then it was featured on Riverdale and it went from 5,000 listens to a million. Back then, that was crazy. Even now, it’s still pretty cool.”

Off the back of the success of ‘Waves’, Lewis released his debut LP A Place We Knew, which featured another mega hit in the form of ‘Be Alright’. His trajectory took a knock when Covid hit, though thankfully, TikTok was on-hand to save the day.

“It gave me a second chance,” he notes, “because after ‘Be Alright’, I had this huge hit and then I had two years off with Covid. We couldn’t even tour. TikTok is a place where, if you make great art and keep posting about it in a genuine way, it can connect to a grand audience. Great art always finds a way. In my experience, even the songs that didn’t get a big push, the ones that actually had some sprinkle of greatness on them in between all the bad ones – if you get lucky enough to have one or two of those, they always find a way.”

I ask the singer if he takes care to separate himself from social media, especially in the age of trolls.

“Well I am a bit of an idiot – I just post everything,” he considers. “I’ll go on Discord and say, ‘I’m on in 20!’, and all my fans react. I’m on the voice chat always talking to them, and then I get in trouble, because I’m telling them, ‘Oh, I’m gonna put this song out next.’ My label gets really angry at me but I just love it!”

As Lewis notes, certain tracks from his upcoming third LP have been in the works for a while.

“Some of these songs I have been playing for seven years,” he reflects. “My first album I made a bit too long. The second, The Hardest Love, I made a bit too short, and I probably should have put more songs on there!”

And what about the upcoming The Epilogue?

“The songs are better than the last album,” he suggests. “I mean, I love the last album, I really do. But my band has been telling me, ‘This is even better than the last one!’ You never know if you have that song, but overall the album is just better. I let go of some ideas of what I was trying to do and just did what I wanted to do.”

It’s all a lot brighter than those dog days of the pandemic.

“I really thought everything was over,” recalls Lewis. “I’m telling you, I thought when I came back from Covid and the songs weren’t connecting, it was over. It’s been 20 months of touring non-stop. We kept doing these venues and they just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

• The Epilogue is released on October 18.

Read the full Electric Picnic special in the latest issue of Hot Press, available now