d4vd 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 17-year-old, born David Burke, scored a breakout hit in summer 2022 with the melancholic indie rock song “Romantic Homicide,” whose brutally honest lyrics about heartbreak and resentment have connected with hundreds of thousands of listeners. His slow-building beachy ballad, “Here With Me” also climbed the charts, establishing d4vd as a genre-defying newcomer. d4vd’s intuitive command of lyricism stems from his years of scribbling raps and poems in his journal since childhood and his versatile interests shine in his music, drawing primarily from manga for his “real and grounded” narratives. “Romantic Homicide,” a song recorded entirely on an iPhone, reached No. 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and led to d4vd signing to Darkroom/Interscope before d4vd even graduated high school.