Get to know IAMDDB, the ice cold vocalist blending neo-soul and trap

Further education’s certainly not for everyone, and it took IAMDDB just one hour to figure out her time would be better spent honing her icily assertive vocal delivery than sitting in a lecture hall.

“I thought the lecture was sick,” she explains of her brief dalliance with English literature and linguistics. “But I decided I could apply it to life instead and left that day.” Academia’s loss is music’s gain, it seems. The 21-year-olds blend of neo-soul and trap braggadocio has won fans aplenty across three EP’s including the recently released ‘Hoodrich Vol 3’.

Born Diana Debrito, the singer studied performing arts at college in the UK, after returning from Angola where she had spent six months performing in a jazz band with her father. After forgoing her university education, she kept herself afloat
with a string of retail jobs in her native Manchester while working on her self-coined ‘urban jazz sound’ under the IAMDDB moniker. “I was mainly out here by myself,” she says of her home town’s initial ambivalence to her sound. “Nobody wanted to take the music, nobody wanted to listen – only a couple people would let me in the studio.”