D4vd is sitting in a booth at Alicia Keys’ famed Jungle City studio in New York. Surrounded by some of the most advanced recording equipment in the world, the rising star is supposed to be singing into a Neumann microphone worth $4,000. Somehow, though, it just isn’t quite giving him the sound he wants. “I was like: ‘Bro, I don’t know how to use this,’” he tells NME a few weeks later, back at his parents’ house in Houston, Texas. “I pulled out my phone and I was in the booth, in front of the mic, using BandLab!” He laughs disbelievingly, before adding that over time he did start to feel more at home in the expensively-outfitted studio. “I kind of overcame that and figured out how to work with producers and engineers,” he says. “I was trying to figure out how it is for the quote-unquote ‘normal’ artist.”
Suffice to say, d4vd is not a normal artist. The 18-year-old, born David Burke, is far from the first person to write a hit song in their bedroom, but he might just be the first to create a worldwide Top 40 hit while curled up in his sister’s closet using nothing more than a pair of EarPods and a free iPhone app. In July 2022, his heartbroken indie-rock earworm ‘Romantic Homicide’ went massively viral on TikTok on its way to racking up millions of streams around the globe.
Its success earned him a deal with Darkroom Records, home to the likes of Billie Eilish and Holly Humberstone, and paved the way for his recently released debut EP ‘Petals to Thorns’, which was also created entirely on his phone. Now, he lands on The Cover, NME’s commitment to exclusively spotlight emerging and rising artists across the globe on a weekly basis.
To begin with, all d4vd wanted was to make a couple of songs so that YouTube would stop taking down his Fortnite videos. That was November 2021. Back then, d4vd was a home-schooled video games obsessive dreaming of getting so good at online third-person shooter he could turn pro. When he uploaded his highlight videos, however, they would frequently get removed because they featured other people’s music.
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