There’s a YouTube video floating around from the early 90s where Kurt Cobain, the guy who basically rewrote the rules of rock music, admits he can’t play a major chord. Can’t play a minor chord either. Says he couldn’t pass a guitar 101 class and that everyone knows more than him. It’s the kind of confession that would tank most musicians’ credibility. For an 18-year-old kid named Nodust, it was permission.
“The biggest musician in the world is sitting here saying he has no idea what he’s doing, he’s just doing it because it’s fun and he likes it,” Nodust recalls about watching that clip with friends. The next move was predictable in hindsight: a Blue Snowball USB mic, GarageBand, and songs made in his bedroom. The less predictable part is where that impulse led him, somewhere in the space between 2013 Chief Keef and the hyper-technical flows of artists like Nettspend and Xaviersobased.
The grunge connection isn’t just backstory padding. Nodust grew up on Pearl Jam and Silverchair, his parents’ rotation forming the first layer of whatever musical DNA he’d eventually develop. He got his first guitar at six, though he’ll tell you he wasn’t any good until around twenty. The pivot to rap came at ten, when 50 Cent’s “Ok, You’re Right” hit him the way Nevermind hit suburban kids in 1991. He watched 50’s music videos on repeat for days, already knowing this was the direction.
Nodust’s trajectory mirrors the garage-to-bedroom pipeline that defined grunge, just filtered through FL Studio. He writes, records, mixes, and masters everything himself. He makes his own cover art. He edits his own music videos. There’s no team, no label infrastructure, just a guy who’d rather spend 14 hours straight on a single track than wonder what might’ve happened if he’d tried.
“If I don’t try then one day I’ll be left wondering what my life would have looked like if I chased that dream, and I would die not knowing,” he says. “That’s just something that I can’t accept.”
His sound has gone through deliberate mutation. The first two years were heavily emoplugg, drawing from artists like D1v, bladee, and Caspr, plus his close friend Kill Red. Good music, he says, but not quite his. The shift came late last year when he discovered the new wave of hyper-rap, artists with flows so technical they felt genuinely unprecedented. He noticed something: nobody was bringing melodic sensibility to the trap and jerk beats that had been everywhere. An untapped market, in his words.
The result was “Clairvoyance” with producer 999ines, a track that made him feel, for the first time, like he might actually have a shot. He invested in a proper music video, and the returns were immediate. His latest release, “Numbers,” dropped November 28 and does exactly what you’d expect from someone who describes his music as “2013 Chief Keef but he has ADHD and a hyper-fixation with Chrome Hearts hoodies and stimulants.” It’s two minutes of heavy bass and signature cadence, the kind of track that sounds like it was made by someone who genuinely loses track of time in the process.
His creative workflow is worth noting because it’s so specific. He picks a beat, throws it in FL, adds his baseline vocal preset, then literally spits gibberish into the mic. At that stage, he’s just hunting for melody and finding where the emphasis should land. Then he writes actual lyrics to match the gibberish, records those, and spends roughly half of his marathon sessions on mixing alone. If it doesn’t get finished in one go, it probably won’t get finished at all.
“The whole process is so fun and it’s so easy to get lost in it because it’s really the only time I can actually be in the moment,” he explains. He’s not worrying about the past or the future when he’s in that zone. The losing track of time isn’t a side effect. It’s the whole point.
He’s quick to credit the people who’ve helped him get here: producers like Sheepy (@sheepy_kid), collaborator c0ll!e, and especially his girlfriend SuziWithAnUzi, who’s been building her own presence in the Toronto scene. She shoots his videos and a lot of his Instagram content too. Seeing someone close to him operate at the level he’s aiming for has given him the proof he needs that it’s possible. His mom gets a shoutout too. She gets genuinely pissed now if he drops something without sending it to her first.
The Toronto show circuit is next. Dates are coming, and he’s telling people to watch his socials for announcements. There are songs ready to go and another music video in final edits. The goal hasn’t changed: make people feel something. He points to “Sound of Silence” by D1v and “Notice” by Kill Red as the benchmark. He swears they put drugs in those tracks. He’s had full days of streaming just those two songs on repeat, eight hours straight. That’s the feeling he’s chasing.
It’s a big ask. But then again, Kurt Cobain said he didn’t know a major chord, and look what he did with that.
Keep up with Nodust on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music.
