\n<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was grinding. He was posting every day, playing every day, he was trying his hardest to get somewhere,\u201d says a 21-year-old New York\u2013based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. \u201cBro, I would just wake up sometimes and it would just be multiple posts from him. He was just trying to pop off, just get one good video.\u201d<\/p>\n
By 2021, D4vd was 16 and already building a brand as a socially awkward outcast who spent nearly all of his time online. (It helped that he was homeschooled.) Sometimes, it paid off: When he started catering to the YouTube algorithm by adding popular songs to his Fortnite<\/em> videos, they racked up hundreds of thousands of views and generated \u201ca lot of money\u201d in ad revenue, he\u2019d later tell musician Benny Blanco in an interview. But those massive views also brought copyright strikes\u2014warnings from YouTube, prompted by record labels, to remove the songs or risk getting booted from the platform. That\u2019s when, according to the now mythic origin story that D4vd has relayed in the press, his mom had a life-altering suggestion: Why didn\u2019t her son make his own damn music?<\/p>\n Using his iPhone, a pair of earbuds, and a mobile app called Bandlab, D4vd\u2014he adopted the moniker around this time, in part for search engine optimization\u2014huddled in his sister\u2019s closet and recorded himself freestyling over a royalty-free piano beat he found on YouTube. He uploaded the track, called \u201cRun Away,\u201d to Soundcloud in December 2021 and tagged it with keywords that helped it go viral: #emo #chill #lowfi #slowedandreverb #blowthisup #foryoupage.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t until July 2022, when he self-released the brooding ballad \u201cRomantic Homicide,\u201d that the then-17-year-old really blew up. Two months later, D4vd signed a deal with Interscope Records\u2019 Darkroom imprint. The comparisons to Billie Eilish, who also scored a deal with Darkroom as a teenager after uploading tracks to Soundcloud, were immediate. In magazine profiles, D4vd was heralded as a new kind of wunderkind: a sheltered gamer who accidentally became a pop star, seemingly overnight. GQ dubbed him a \u201cmouthpiece for Gen-Z heartache.\u201d NME declared he was a \u201cmulti-genre visionary.\u201d And Billboard christened D4vd \u201cone of alternative music\u2019s most promising new artists.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I found him, it was like, \u2018Wow, he made this in his closet on headphones, on Bandlab. That\u2019s so cool. I could do that, too,\u2019\u201d says Ykare, a popular TikTokker who used to dream about collaborating with D4vd. \u201cThat was his whole thing. That was his claim to fame. I think that\u2019s really what brought in a lot of younger audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Ykare found his niche\u2014dressing as a Teletubby and singing in the shower\u2014he was inspired by D4vd\u2019s humble beginnings. \u201cPeople looked up to him,\u201d Ykare says, because of D4vd\u2019s explosive breakout from a \u201chomemade, \u2018I made this in my bedroom\u2019 niche. That\u2019s where D4vd lived, and he kind of was the most successful to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n D4vd communicated with his super-young fans through his Discord. His server was created by a fan named Moji around the time he signed his record deal. Though not officially affiliated with Darkroom, the Discord had a clear benefit to the label: It was a way to promote releases, tour dates, and merchandise directly to superfans. Moderators, which were mostly other fans but also included at least one member of D4vd\u2019s management team, Mogul Vision, and occasionally D4vd himself, shared links to new content and encouraged members to subscribe to D4vd\u2019s email list for presale ticket codes. (Neither Mogul Vision, Darkroom, Interscope Geffen A&M Records, nor its parent company, Universal Music Group, responded to a request for comment.) The tactics also cemented D4vd\u2019s perceived authenticity as a chronically online teenager without much media training.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n