All you need is a smartphone and some applications to compose, record and broadcast music without having to leave your room. Songs as if they were toys for the very young of Gen Z who, after a hangover on TikTok, dream of waking up international stars. It can actually happen. For example, Billie Eilish proved it to us, but she is not the only one to have accomplished the prodigy. From her room in Houston, Texas, another young pop phenomenon under 20 has made inroads into the global charts. It is written d4vd, it reads David. Born in 2005, he talks about love in the age of social networks amid torments and pains in the heart. In his life his petals turn into thorns, as he sings in his first EP Petals to Thorns. Someone already talks about a revelation artist.
“I’ve never been in love, if anything seriously infatuated. When your feelings are not reciprocated, you discover that you live a relationship in a completely one-sided way. Conveying songs written in the midst of this delirious situation into a recording project was like putting the pieces of a puzzle back together. I decided to work on the theme of self-reflection because in the end every day was as if I were talking to myself alone».
There are nine tracks that are part of this journey to discover an early emotional maturity, from the hit Romantic Homicidewhich exploded last summer thanks to the tiktoker people, up to Placebo effect, last of the unpublished. “Deep in my mind you’re dead and I haven’t shed a single tear,” she sings with dramatic tone. «For the video of Romantic Homicide I gave life to the character of IT4MI, which in Japanese means “pain”. He wears a blindfold because blind love sees nothing but suffering.’
As a good digital native, d4vd arrived at music via videogames. When he started getting interested in music and writing he had a channel where he edited videos from Fortnite. «I had about 50,000 subscribers, I enjoyed editing dozens of videos which, having gone viral in a very short time, led me to collide with copyright problems related to the songs I used. It was my mother who gave me the advice about the turning point. “You should produce your own music,” she told me. And so I did. I picked up my iPhone and downloaded the BandLab application, a free social music platform that allows you to create music and share it with other musicians and fans. From here my first song was born Run Away. I saw myself as a sort of Hans Zimmer.”
TikTok did the rest. «It has never been as easy as today to communicate one’s inner world to the outside world. There are no barriers, there are no rules. Social media is the biggest advocate an artist can have. If you fail, you can create another account without others knowing. I changed my name three times before becoming d4vd».
