They Made D4vd a Star. Now They Want Him Convicted of Murder
“He worked. He posted every day, played every day, he did his best to achieve something,” says a 21-year-old New York-based gamer who goes by the name Sacred WTF. “Brother, I would wake up sometimes and it would just be multiple messages from him. He was just trying to get out, just trying to get a good video.”
In 2021, D4vd was 16 years old and already building a brand as a socially awkward outcast who spent almost all of his time online. (It helped that he was homeschooled.) Sometimes it paid off: when he started following YouTube’s algorithm by adding popular songs to his Fortnite videos, they racked up hundreds of thousands of views and generated “a lot of money” in advertising revenue, he later told musician Benny Blanco in an interview. But these massive views also gave rise to copyright strikes: warnings from YouTube, prompted by record labels, to remove songs or risk being booted from the platform. That’s when, according to the now-mythical origin story that D4vd relayed in the press, his mother had a life-changing suggestion: why didn’t her son make his own damn music?
Using his iPhone, a pair of headphones, and a mobile app called Bandlab, D4vd (he adopted the moniker around this time, partly for search engine optimization) huddled in his sister’s closet and recorded himself freestyling to a royalty-free piano beat he found on YouTube. He uploaded the track, titled “Run Away,” to Soundcloud in December 2021 and tagged it with keywords that helped it go viral: #emo #chill #lowfi #slowedandreverb #blowthisup #foryoupage.
But it wasn’t until July 2022, when he self-released the brooding ballad “Romantic Homicide,” that the then-17-year-old really exploded. Two months later, D4vd signed a deal with Interscope Records’ Darkroom imprint. The comparisons to Billie Eilish, who also signed a deal with Darkroom as a teenager after uploading tracks to Soundcloud, were immediate. In magazine profiles, D4vd was presented as a new type of child prodigy: a sheltered gamer who accidentally became a pop star, seemingly overnight. GQ called him “Gen Z’s spokesperson for grief.” NME said he was a “multi-genre visionary”. And Billboard called D4vd “one of alternative music’s most promising new artists.”
“When I found him, I was like, ‘Wow, he did that in his closet with headphones, on Bandlab. It’s so cool. I could do that too,” says Ykare, a popular TikToker who dreamed of collaborating with D4vd. “It was his whole thing. That was his claim to fame. I think that’s really what attracted a lot of the younger crowd.”
Before Ykare found his niche – dressing as Teletubby and singing in the shower – he took inspiration from the humble beginnings of D4vd. “People looked up to him,” Ykare says, because of D4vd’s explosive escape from a “homemade, ‘I made this in my bedroom’ niche. That’s where D4vd lived, and he was kind of the most successful at doing that.”
D4vd communicated with his very young fans via his Discord. Its server was created by a fan named Moji around the time he signed his recording contract. Although not officially affiliated with Darkroom, the Discord had an obvious advantage for the label: it was a way to promote releases, tour dates, and merchandise directly to superfans. The moderators, who were mostly other fans but also included at least one member of D4vd’s management team, Mogul Vision, and sometimes D4vd itself, shared links to new content and encouraged members to subscribe to D4vd’s mailing list to obtain ticket pre-sale codes. (Neither Mogul Vision, Darkroom, Interscope Geffen A&M Records, nor its parent company, Universal Music Group, responded to a request for comment.) These tactics also cemented D4vd’s perceived authenticity as a chronically online teenager without much media training.
