Before Christian Gates was a name on a tour poster, there was a handle: @itsluxcity. That is where it started, with stripped-down covers and raw, one-take vocal performances, the raspy voice out front and no polish to hide behind. The audience found him there first, by the millions, long before there was an album to sell them.
A proving ground in public
The ItsLuxCity feed was a laboratory. Gates posted emotional covers of songs like Beyoncé’s “Halo” and the Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah,” reworked in his own moody register, alongside originals tested a few seconds at a time. He even shared how he engineered his vocals in FL Studio. Every post was a small experiment, and the audience’s reaction was the data. It is how an unsigned kid learns exactly what works before he ever spends money making it.
The cult
ItsLuxCity was never a throwaway username. It is the alter ego Gates still carries across TikTok, Instagram and X, and the community that formed around it did something rare: it named itself.
I want to build a community. My supporters and I, we call ourselves like “the cult.”Christian Gates, ANA Podcast
He framed the whole rise as a matter of will rather than luck, and that mindset became the fanbase’s identity too. It is a group that shows up, shares, and pushes, the engine behind a song like NUMB going Gold with no label behind it. More on them in Welcome to The Cult.
The difference between those people and me right now is drive.Christian Gates, ANA Podcast
From the phone to the stage
The internet-first come-up became something that does not stay online. Gates earned a Gold record, took the stage at Lollapalooza, headlined The Underworld in London, and in 2026 landed on Don Diablo and Wiz Khalifa’s Go Home With A Stranger, all while keeping the audience that found him first.
The raspy voice that broke through on a phone camera now carries a festival stage.
Two sides of one artist
ItsLuxCity and Christian Gates are not two careers; they are two names for the same person, the internet-native experimenter and the dark-pop songwriter. The handle is the origin story, and he has never tried to bury it. The full story is in the wiki, and he is on the road with the I Believe In Ghosts Tour.