Biography
'lil dirtbag' (Nicholas Reid) is a shoegaze artist and producer based in Newfoundland, Canada. Coming from the cold foggy northeast, dirtbag started producing music at the age of 15 on a demo version of FL Studio. During the early years of his career, he mainly produced hip-hop music but quickly found his alternative style amongst the genre with his most notable work producing songs for both the late Lil Peep and Lil Bo Weep/Unaloon, alongside being the producer in the trap-metal group Cult Sindicate. With influences like The Smashing Pumpkins, Turnover, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and more you'd expect from a shoegaze musician, dirtbag also notes influence from acts unbelonging to the whirly genre such as Bon Iver, Red Hot Chili Peppers (notably John Frusciante), The Lumineers, and Jimi Hendrix as notable figures throughout his music journey and career. As a guitarist-before-producer, dirtbag found himself slowly crafting and focusing on sounds that were more authentic to himself over the years, sitting next to an amp to find himself in the noise ringing throughout his room he unknowingly started producing his first shoegaze record to deal with grief, a lost relationship, a feeling no of self importance. in late October of 2023, dirtbag was encouraged to put out his first shoegaze release 'Wide Awake' after posting it to r/shoegaze the week prior looking for some feedback from listeners familiar of the genre and not so familiar with him to which it blew up unexpectedly (currently sitting at 140k+ views on reddit as I'm writing this) . Equipped with nothing more but the overwhelming motivation and courage from the unexpected amount of positive feedback by real shoegazers and shoegaze fanatics, dirtbag released his debut shoegaze album 'it's been too real' less than a month later and has been becoming more and more of a prominent name in the scene ever since.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.