Guardin

About Guardin

Guardin is what happens when someone grows up extremely online and decides to turn their bedroom into a recording studio. Born Nicholas Kerr, the Chicago-area artist started uploading music to SoundCloud in the mid-2010s, back when the platform was still the wild west for sad kids with laptops and something to say.

His early work landed somewhere between emo rap and bedroom pop before those terms got overused. Think lo-fi beats, confessional lyrics about anxiety and failed relationships, and the kind of production quality that signals authenticity to a certain audience. He wasn't trying to sound polished. The point was that it felt real, like reading someone's diary except it rhymes and there's a guitar sample.

Guardin built his following the old-fashioned new way: consistently dropping tracks online, accumulating streams one late-night listen at a time. Songs like "whatever it takes" and "again" connected with people who spent too much time on the internet and not enough time convinced they were okay. His output has been relentless. We're talking dozens of projects, hundreds of songs, the kind of catalog that's impossible to fully keep track of unless you're chronically online yourself.

Albums like "il principe" and "so worried" showcase his range, moving between acoustic vulnerability and trap-influenced production without feeling scattered. He's not locked into one sound, which makes sense for someone who treats music less like a formal career and more like a compulsion. The lyrics stay in the same emotional territory though: isolation, self-doubt, romantic turbulence, the usual suspects for someone making sad music in their early twenties.

What's interesting is how he's managed to sustain this. Most SoundCloud-era artists either broke through to mainstream attention or faded out. Guardin found a third path: building a dedicated fanbase that doesn't need him to be famous. His Spotify numbers are solid, not spectacular. He tours small venues. He's not on magazine covers or festival posters, and that seems fine.

The visual aesthetic matches the music. Lots of dark colors, moody photography, the kind of artwork that would fit equally well on a MySpace page circa 2007 or a Spotify playlist today. There's a timelessness to being sad and twenty-something, and guardin has figured out how to bottle that.

These days he's still releasing music at an alarming pace, still working largely independently, still living in that same emotional space even as the production has gotten cleaner. Whether he's making the same album over and over or slowly evolving depends on how closely you're listening. Either way, for a certain type of listener going through a certain type of night, his music does exactly what it needs to do.

Guardin's sets are quiet events where the room actually goes silent. Audiences lean in rather than dance. The sound design becomes the focal point—every detail audible, every drift in the mix noticeable. Minimal stage presence, maximum attention to the music itself.

Known for Neon, Drift, Static, Below, Frequency

See Guardin Live