The genre-defying newcomer d4vd, born David Burke, emerged as a visionary artist only one year after he began writing and recording heart-piercing tracks alone in his sister’s closet in Houston, Texas. d4vd gained his now-eclectic taste in rap and indie music from internet wormholes and fan-made Fortnite videos on YouTube, which he also started creating as a homeschooled teenager. As an avid player who has amassed over fifty thousand subscribers on his gaming channel, he noticed that the songs in his game montages were getting copyright strikes, and his mother suggested that he should write his own original music as a solution. This motivated d4vd to start recording his own tracks after discovering an easy-to-use music-making app called BandLab. He’s released a smattering of singles touching everything from indie-alternative to pop to R&B, and the 18-year-old scored a breakout hit in summer 2022 with the RIAA Platinum certified melancholic indie rock song ‘Romantic Homicide’. Recorded entirely on an iPhone, the track reached No. 34 on the BillboardHot 100 chart and led to him signing to Darkroom/Interscope before d4vd even graduated high school. His slow-building beachy ballad, ‘Here With Me’ followed suit, breaking into the Billboard Hot 100 in January 2023 and quickly becoming RIAA Gold Certified.