For years, Two Feet has been synonymous with late-night desire, shadowy basslines, and songs that felt tailor-made for dim rooms and tangled emotions. Behind the moniker is Bill Dess: an artist whose rise was meteoric, whose struggles were largely invisible, and whose return is impossible to ignore. We had the privilege of hearing Songs for February ahead of its release and speaking with Dess to enter during a moment of deep reflection. With almost a year of sobriety under his belt, he is on the cusp of sharing the most honest music of his career.
“I’m just about at a year. I’ll celebrate my sober birthday on tour.” — Bill Dess (Two Feet)
There’s no grandiose declaration in his voice, just a steady presence of gratitude and purpose. Sobriety didn’t come easily, or quickly. Like many, Dess tried to get clean multiple times. “I don’t think anyone can just get sober,” he admits. “On average people go to rehab six or seven times. For me, it was all those other attempts building up maturity, perspective.” The turning point came when the stakes became undeniable: “When it became pretty clear I was close to death, that made me look outward. I realized I really haven’t said nearly enough of what I want to say before I die.” That realization changed everything.
While the last seven years of Two Feet releases where successful and grew a large loyal fanbase, they were by Dess’s own account, “missing something essential.”
“There was no real growth. No expansion outward from what I had created sonically before I got fucked up on drugs and alcohol. I kept making music I knew people would like. There was never any risk involved.” — Bill Dess (Two Feet)
Even when he managed short periods of sobriety, the connection wasn’t there: “I couldn’t possibly care if I was sober for that month. I couldn’t be as connected as I am now.”
Songs for February, releasing this Friday, February 6, marks far more than a new chapter. It is the first body of work Bill Dess has written entirely sober since his 2017 breakout single, “Feel Like I’m Drowning,” a song that now reads like a warning. What followed was global success paired with quiet self-destruction — a paradox that nearly cost him his life. Success came fast and so did the darkness.
“If you saw me in the last seven years, you haven’t actually seen me.” — Bill Dess (Two Feet)
While selling out shows and performing for massive festival crowds, his health was failing. ER visits, organ damage, and a doctor’s warning that he might only have a few years left forced him to confront the truth: he wasn’t done yet. Now, Dess creates from a place of urgency and purpose, but not panic. “It’s an enormous desire to express myself,” he says. “To create in the void before you die.” It’s that drive that pulses through Songs for February, making it feel less like a comeback and more like an arrival.
Songs for February is radically different. The prolific energy that once defined his early career has returned — this time grounded in presence rather than chaos. Written almost instinctively over the course of two weeks, the EP poured out of him with a clarity he hadn’t felt in years: “This one feels truly honest. It popped right out of me. And since then, things have just been flowing.”
Sonically, the project feels expansive and immersive like music that fills your ears and your chest at the same time. Emotional ballads sit beside raw, exposed moments in the haunting opening track “Stay Away From Me” followed by a mesmerizing counterpart in “Your Way Back To Me.” The acoustic guitar riffs are raw, and the vocals are warm. The satisfying sound spills over into “Could You Still Want Me,” but with a progressive rock turn that really makes you want to just lay back and look at some clouds. It’s not a reinvention for reinvention’s sake, but a widening of the emotional lens. You can hear the patience and breath between notes. The absence of numbing. The growth is undeniable and extends beyond the studio. “You break down to nothing,” Dess says of early sobriety, “and then you have to rebuild your entire life.” His goals shifted inward first. Less urgency, more internalization:“I knew I had about a year of just absorbing what was happening.”
When it comes to performing sober for the first time in his career, he’s still discovering what that will mean. “For the fans, it’s going to be such a difference,” he says.
“I don’t really remember the shows or places from before. When you’re intoxicated, you don’t remember. Now I’ll have the real feelings that go along with the music. Even if everything sounds the same, the honesty will be felt.” — Bill Dess (Two Feet)
I couldn’t agree more. Even through a zoom call, the authenticity was felt, and real.
That honesty is the spine of Songs for February. It’s also deeply rooted in the music that shaped him long before Two Feet existed. After a few weeks of sobriety, something unexpected happened: music started to move him again. “I got chills,” he says. Instead of chasing new sounds, he went back to his roots like Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, early Coldplay (Parachutes). “It’s a safe place to revisit,” he adds. There’s nothing like tuning into the formative years music that ignited the fire in the first place.
Dess’s relationship with music has always been instinctual. From a childhood filled with orchestral movie scores to mastering nearly every instrument placed in his hands, music was the one place he consistently showed up. He played everything from upright bass to viola to percussion, eventually landing in jazz clubs around New York City and producing beats under dozens of aliases. When he finally honed in on the sound that became Two Feet — blues guitar, trap drums, distorted bass, and unconventional melodies — everything clicked. “Go Fuck Yourself” was the spark. The rest snowballed.
To listeners struggling with addiction themselves or know somebody who is, Dess offers something simple and vital: “You’re not alone. You are seen and understood. There are people who care and will listen. Try to talk to someone. Come to the meetings.”
To today’s artists, Dess offers a wide perspective to keep in mind: “In my opinion, if you imagine every human as a rolling ball of electricity just rolling down the street: artists in particular have this need to throw off sparks of lighting and a lot of the time as they are rolling along in their electrical life down the street they’ll throw off a really brilliant spark, and then sometimes they’ll throw off a little shitty one, and then sometimes they’ll throw off a really crazy bolt and I think that has to do with longevity of the artist and their lifespan, and not everything they put out is gonna be brilliant or really good. The major problem with artists is they get so hot and so electrically boiling that they want to diminish and dampen it with alcohol or self hate or whatever, and that ruins them for the rest of their journey. I just hope and pray most artists can stay away from what I did or if they can recover if they haven’t, so they can retain and come back to their bright lightning self and shooting off little sparks as they roll along.”
Two Feet truly stands out as one of the most authentic artists to grace our soundscape in a long time. In an industry often driven by image, momentum, and constant output, Bill Dess has defied the odds by choosing honesty over escapism and presence over performance. Songs for February is not just a return — it’s proof of what happens when survival meets sincerity. For the first time in years, Bill Dess isn’t reaching for the ground beneath him, he’s standing firmly on his own Two Feet: fully alive, fully present, and finally ready to be seen.
Written by Franny Kovacs
Photographed by Nikki Phillips & Franny Kovacs