guardin

guardin, born Nicholas Jordan Kerr-Carpenter on December 9, 1996, is an American rapper, singer-songwriter and producer from Hornell, New York. He began as a teenage beatmaker, pulling loops from Looperman and stitching them together in Audacity, uploading his earliest instrumentals as a young producer on SoundCloud years before he ever rapped or sang himself.

His sound sits at the emo-tinged edge of internet rap, shaped by an early love of bands like Taking Back Sunday, AFI and Hawthorne Heights alongside rappers such as Oliver Francis. That mix of guitar-driven melancholy and lo-fi hip-hop production became guardin's signature after 2016, when the track «hydroponic» marked his shift from purely producing to writing and performing his own songs.

guardin toured as a support act on Oliver Francis's Overdrive Tour in 2018 and signed to Photo Finish Records in 2019 before returning to independent releases. Across his catalogue — including songs like «i think you're really cool», «Demons In My Orbit» and «solitary» — he pairs confessional, often bruised lyrics about isolation and heartbreak with hazy, guitar-laced beats, placing him alongside the wave of SoundCloud-born artists who blurred the line between emo and rap in the late 2010s.