Nodust Writes His Lyrics Last and That’s Exactly the Point

There’s a moment in Nodust’s creative process where nothing makes sense, and that’s by design. Before a single coherent word hits the track, he’s in front of his mic spitting pure nonsense, syllables that mean nothing but feel like everything. It sounds absurd until you realize it might be the most honest approach to making rap music in 2025.

The artist has built his entire workflow around what he casually calls “gibberish.” He loads a beat into FL Studio, throws on his baseline vocal preset, and starts recording sounds that aren’t words. At this stage, he’s not writing. He’s hunting for something more primal: the melody, the emotional peaks, the places where a vocal effect might hit harder. The lyrics come later, reverse-engineered from the shapes his voice already made.

“I literally spit gibberish in the mic,” Nodust explains. “At this point I’m just trying to create the melody and find key points for vocal emphasis and effects, then I listen back and I write lyrics to the gibberish.”

It’s a technique that flips traditional songwriting on its head. Most rappers start with bars, with meaning, with something to say. Nodust starts with feeling, trusting that the right words will eventually find their way into the spaces his instincts already carved out. The approach raises a question worth asking: in an era where melodic rap dominates, does what you say matter less than how it sounds when you say it?

The answer, if you’ve been paying attention to artists like Nettspend, esdeekid, and Xaviersobased, seems to be yes. These are the names Nodust cites when talking about discovering what he calls “ultra technical flows that have never been done before.” Not technical in the traditional sense of dense wordplay or complex rhyme schemes, but technical in the architecture of sound itself. The way a syllable bends. The precise moment a voice cracks into something vulnerable. The texture of a phrase that might not parse grammatically but hits you somewhere beneath language.

Nodust came up through the emoplugg scene, drawing heavy inspiration from artists like D1v, Bladee, and his best friend Kill Red. That foundation taught him something crucial about emotional resonance. He describes certain songs as being “like drugs,” and he’s not using the comparison loosely. “I swear they put drugs in those songs,” he says of D1v’s “Sound of Silence” and Kill Red’s “Notice.” “I’ve had full days of only listening to those songs on repeat all day. Like 8 hours straight.”

That obsessive relationship with music, which he attributes partly to his ADHD, informs everything about how he creates. When he found himself drawn to the trap and jerk beats that exploded over the past year, he noticed a gap. Nobody was bringing that emoplugg melodic sensibility to the new sound. The result was tracks like Clairvoyance with producer 999ines, a song that made him feel, for the first time, like he might actually have a shot at making it.

What makes Nodust’s situation unique is that he’s doing all of it alone. Writing, recording, mixing, mastering, cover art, video editing. There’s no team parsing his gibberish recordings into polished product. It’s just him, often for 14 hours straight, because stopping means the song might never get finished. “If I don’t finish it in one go it’ll never get finished,” he admits.

His latest release Numbers, which dropped November 28, continues the formula: massive bass, signature cadence, vocals that prioritize vibe over verbose. It’s music that doesn’t ask you to think. It asks you to feel.

The self-sufficiency extends to his visuals, with videos like M.I.A., Zoot, and Geeked shot by his girlfriend SuziWithAnUzi, who’s established herself in the Toronto scene and serves as both collaborator and proof of concept that this path can actually work.

Nodust is quick to credit the people around him, including producers like Sheepy, his longtime collaborator c0ll!e, and his mom, who genuinely gets pissed if he drops something without sending it to her first. But the creative core remains solitary, almost meditative. He describes making music as “the only time I can actually be in the moment and I’m not worrying about the past or the future.”

There’s something worth noting about an artist who builds songs from meaningless sounds and considers that the most genuine part of the process. In an industry obsessed with authenticity, Nodust has found his by abandoning meaning entirely at the start. The words come last because the words aren’t the point. The point is that high, that feeling, that moment when a syllable lands exactly right even if nobody, including the person who made it, could tell you what it means.

Maybe that’s where rap is heading. Maybe it’s always been there, and we’re just now getting honest about it.

With Toronto shows planned throughout the year, you can keep up with Nodust on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Soundcloud, and Apple Music.