d4vd: “I’m Not A Goals Person”
Nearly every article about pop prodigy d4vd opens by gushing about his warpspeed rise to stardom, and this one will be no different. Forgive us, but it’s hard to look past.
In December 2021, d4vd — then going by David Burke — was a 16-year-old Fortnite streamer with a problem: his YouTube channel was beset with copyright claims over his use of licensed songs in highlight reels. Spurred on by his mum, David resolved to make his own music to sidestep the issue.
He recorded his first song, ‘Run Away’, in his Houston family home from his sister’s closet, using a free iPhone app. He adopted the moniker d4vd (pronounced the same as his birth name), and so a star was born, more pragmatically than parabolically.
‘Run Away’ generated some buzz among fellow streamers, but d4vd’s star shot into orbit in July 2022 with ‘Romantic Homicide’, an melodramatic slice of guitar pop that dials up the angst. It’s captivating and polished by any metric, but especially so for an artist who hadn’t recorded a single note just seven months prior. The song exploded on TikTok (at time of writing, it boasts nearly 900 million Spotify streams) and helped seal the deal between d4vd and Darkroom/Interscope, the label credited with shepherding Billie Eilish to world domination.
Since then, d4vd’s done nothing to assuage predictions of a Billie-level blow up. He landed another hit with the gorgeously gooey ‘Here With Me’, racked up a few million followers on TikTok, and is putting together hundreds of new songs between an industrious touring schedule, all before his 19th birthday.
When d4vd speaks with Junkee from Los Angeles, he’s slowing down after weeks on the run. He peeled off supporting SZA on her US arena tour straight into a slot at Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, squeezing it in between his late night television debut and a 21 Savage collaboration for the new Call of Duty.
But this break has come reluctantly — d4vd is resting on doctor’s orders after inflaming his vocal chords, prompting his first tour postponement. “I never, ever wanted to ever cancel a show ever,” d4vd laments, adding, “If there’s a good reason to cancel a show, it’s because you’ve gone too hard playing the other one.”
Good news: the doctor says he’s “almost back”, clearing the runway for d4vd to return to Australia in February with Laneway Festival. It’ll be his second visit within a year following a pair of intimate shows in Melbourne and Sydney last April. “I think my greatest memory is hearing everybody tell me to do a shoey in the middle of my set,” he says. “It was like, five different people at five different times.”
He didn’t cave then and, if he heeds my unsolicited advice, won’t ever. We talk about festival crowds, that awestruck feeling of seeing a paddock fill as far as the eye can see, and d4vd starts counting up some spots he’s played — Italy, Paris, Germany and so on.
That prompts the obvious, if not clumsy, question: how do you do this? How does a teenager go from streaming on Twitch in their bedroom to sharing the stage with SZA at a sold-out Madison Square Garden within 18 months without being overcome by the moment?
“I am putting on the craziest front of my life, bro,” d4vd says. He compares it to switching between the three characters in Grand Theft Auto V: “I have the artist mode, I have my civilian mode and then my onstage mode. And I kind of swap between them all… I’m not nervous when I’m up there, but I’m not used to it yet.”
Watching d4vd exuberantly charge up and down the stage, it’s easy to forget that his situation is exceedingly rare. Most breakout stars get their moment after years of percolating in relative anonymity, fine-tuning their craft at small shows and with a steady flow of slept-on releases. But d4vd’s ascent is a genuine bolt from the blue.
“Every song I released in 2022 was super unconventional. I feel like I was Hans Zimmer scoring all these Fortnite and Call of Duty montages on YouTube,” he says. That meant a lot of learning on the fly. In past interviews, d4vd has shared some particularly endearing fish-of-out-water moments, like standing in a world-class studio and eschewing the $4,000 microphone for the familiar comforts of recording on his iPhone.
But d4vd is finding his feet fast. His latest collaboration is a link-up with Australia’s own The Kid LAROI on a sparse acoustic number called ‘The Line’ and it’s sensational. LAROI and d4vd complement each other well — LAROI has a coarseness to his voice that accentuates the tenderness in d4vd’s. Whereas d4vd seized our attention with show-stopping bellows on ‘Romantic Homicide’, his vocals on ‘The Line’ trickle like a gentle ravine over producer Omer Fedi’s guitar. It’s another sneaky addition to d4vd’s range, which is growing apace with his fanbase. The song came to be following an approach from LAROI, an artist d4vd said he “idolised”.
“He was like, ‘yo, you know who Elliott Smith is? We got to make something like that,” d4vd says. “We’re bouncing ideas off of each other, and nothing’s happened. Nothing’s working. We can’t quite grasp it. So we both leave. We take a breather. And then Omer comes back with his guitar track and LAROI starts laying all these things out.”
Days later, LAROI sends the track through: “I literally run to the nearest studio. We book the nearest studio and I literally write down my verse, lay it down and send it right back. And then it was finished.”
Barring a last-minute surprise, ‘The Line’ will be the last new track d4vd appears on this year. When asked what he’s most proud of from 2023, d4vd doesn’t hesitate. “Work ethic, work ethic,” he says. “My foot has been on the gas since literally January.”
He tries not to be drawn on setting targets for the year to come: “I’m not a goals person… every goal I’ve made, it’s never worked out.” But d4vd offers three desires for the year to come, all of which he could kick off in style during his upcoming visit Down Under: “For 2024, I just want to make the best music possible, put on the best shows and drop an album. That’s the only three things I want to do.”
d4vd will be in Australia in February 2024 as part of Laneway Festival, alongside artists like Steve Lacy, Stormzy, Dominic Fike and more. You can check out all the dates and other information here.
Reece Hooker is a Melbourne-based writer who can be found on Twitter and Instagram.
Image: Nick Walker