Late last year, Victor Cervantes began posting gauzy, sweetly melancholy bedroom-pop tracks to Soundcloud and Bandcamp, adopting his first name as his nom de upload (he styles it with a terminal exclamation point). Last month the 17-year-old Chicagoan made his physical-media debut with the CD-only EP Glitter98, a self-released collection of six songs that he sold for $10 (the deluxe version, which includes bonus tracks and a lyric booklet, cost $15). In its small way, the EP did spectacularly well. “I made nearly $2,000 in less than a week,” Cervantes says. “They sold out that same week.”
Despite attending an arts school and remaining involved in his church’s music programming, Cervantes didn’t encounter a like-minded musical community till late last year, when he attended Open Mike, the bimonthly series run by Social Works. (Chance the Rapper cofounded the series in 2014 to honor his mentor, Brother Mike, and to help young people learn how to perform and find collaborators.) At Open Mike, Cervantes ran into an aspiring rapper who records as Blake Saint David. “He told me, ‘Hey, I like your shirt’—I was wearing a Brockhampton shirt,” Cervantes says. “He found my Soundcloud link, listened to it, and he really liked it. He invited me to perform at his show, which was my first show.”
