Isaac Dunbar

Isaac Dunbar is an American singer, songwriter and producer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who taught himself music production as a bullied, closeted kid using pirated software and YouTube tutorials, then signed to RCA Records at 16 without ever changing his given name into a stage name. Openly gay and a 2023 GLAAD Media Award nominee, Dunbar has built a decade-long catalog, from the 2019 breakout EP balloons don't float here through 2024's Beep Beep Repeat, on confessional lyrics, self-produced maximalist pop, and a persona he calls “controlled eccentricity.”

Early Life and Self-Taught Beginnings

Isaac Dunbar was born March 17, 2003, in Rhode Island, the son of a Liberian father and an Italian mother. His family moved several times in his early childhood, including a stretch in Texas, before settling on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the town of Barnstable, which he has cited in his official RCA biography as his true hometown even as press has variously described the area as "Cape Cod" or the nearby community of Sandwich. He was raised in a strict, conservative Christian household in which secular pop music was, in his words, treated as carnal, and his earliest exposure to it came when his sister secretly showed him Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" on the family computer.

Bullied and socially isolated as a child, Dunbar has described himself as cocooned in his bedroom, scouring the internet for new music rather than socializing with peers. At around age eight or nine, after Lady Gaga tweeted a list of the producers behind her album Artpop, Dunbar noticed that one of them, the French house producer Madeon, used FL Studio, and decided to teach himself the software. He pirated a copy at a Barnes & Noble in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and reverse-engineered his sound by rebuilding Artpop tracks from scratch, teaching himself piano, keyboard, synths, and music theory entirely from YouTube tutorials.

SoundCloud, Nathan James, and the First Deal

At 12, Dunbar began uploading original songs to SoundCloud. His early demo "Woman on the Hills" sat at only a few hundred plays but caught the attention of artist manager Nathan James in 2017, when Dunbar's SoundCloud bio read simply "14-year-old producer/artist from Cape Cod." James tracked down Dunbar and his parents within weeks and became his manager, later founding the management company Little Worry, which built a roster including hemlocke springs, PVRIS, dhruv, Myles Cameron, Bliss Samsa, Brahny, and Lo Village alongside Dunbar.

The real inflection point came on October 31, 2017, when the taste-making blog We Are Going Solo reposted his track "pharmacy," widening his audience considerably. RCA Records reached out shortly after, but Dunbar, unusual for a teenager courted by a major label, did not take the meeting for nearly a year, wanting first to figure out what he wanted to do with his career. Instead, in 2018 he signed a distribution deal with Platoon and self-released his debut EP, balloons don't float here, on July 12, 2019. The late-2018 single "Freshman Year," premiered by The Fader on October 2, 2018, and dealing directly with high-school bullying, built further momentum, as did "pharmacy" earning a spin from Zane Lowe on Beats 1, a moment Dunbar recalls happening while he was sitting in a culinary class: his manager texted him to check Apple Music, he screamed, and his teacher confiscated his phone.

In fall 2019 he toured supporting the Norwegian artist Girl in Red and appeared on MTV's PUSH Live concert series. Dunbar and James returned to RCA, this time motivated by what James described as the label's healthy A&R ecosystem for young artists rather than simple persistence, and Dunbar signed to RCA Records in October 2019 at age 16.

Signing to RCA and the Early EPs

Dunbar's major-label debut EP, isaac's insects, arrived April 9, 2020, its title track having come out that January alongside slots on Idolator's "artists to watch" list and E! News's "Future Pop Stars You Need to Know Now." A planned U.S. and European tour launch at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles was scrapped by the COVID-19 pandemic. The EP included "Scorton's Creek," about his first same-gender relationship, kept hidden at the time out of fear for his safety as a gay teenager on Cape Cod, and "Makeup Drawer," a song he had actually written three years earlier, at 14, but deliberately withheld until he felt ready to speak openly. Its release doubled as Dunbar's public coming out to his fanbase; he identifies plainly as gay in nearly all subsequent press, using he/him pronouns, even as a Wikipedia summary of one TikTok has described his self-description as "unlabeled."

He followed with evil twin on February 19, 2021, written and recorded between July and December 2020 and built around what he described as a duality between a melodramatic, lovey-dovey pop side and an angrier, more experimental one. That same period he contributed "God, This Feels Good," co-written with pop songwriter Leland, to the soundtrack of Hulu's Love, Victor.

Banish the Banshee and GLAAD Recognition

Dunbar's most theatrical conceptual swing arrived May 27, 2022, with Banish the Banshee, an eight-track EP built around an alter ego called "Banshee," born, by his account, from an all-night viewing of The Sound of Music. He described the character as theatric, comical but dark, a higher self used to narrate his own life lessons in the third person, and worked with producer JT Daly on embellishment across the EP. He kicked off a U.S. headline theater tour that June at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles.

The EP's release cycle brought Dunbar his most significant institutional recognition to date. In January 2023 he was nominated for Outstanding Breakthrough Music Artist at the 34th GLAAD Media Awards, alongside Steve Lacy, Dove Cameron, Omar Apollo, Doechii, Reneé Rapp, and Ethel Cain, and Banish the Banshee also helped land him a spot on GLAAD's 20 Under 20 list. That March, Sony Music Group and GLAAD selected him as the debut subject of their three-part "ICONS" video interview series spotlighting LGBTQ+ musicians and songwriters, where he discussed the Banshee persona and his relationship to music as a queer artist.

Beep Beep Repeat and the Queer Nightlife Era

Two days after turning 18 in the summer of 2021, Dunbar had impulsively moved to New York City with a U-Haul without telling his family beforehand, a decision he has since described as his real coming-of-age turning point. The city's Lower East Side drag bars and gay club scene exposed him, for the first time, to the extensiveness of queer culture he says he simply never encountered growing up on Cape Cod, describing that period as opening his eyes to all the ways he could be, exploring gender, identity, and sexuality.

That immersion shaped Beep Beep Repeat, a six-track, disco- and '70s-influenced EP released April 26, 2024, built explicitly around the NYC club scene and featuring the track "I Love to Dance," co-written with bloghouse pioneer Uffie and songwriter Sizzy Rocket. The campaign leaned into queer nightlife iconography, taxicabs as a New York homage, balloons, and a cover shoot and joint interview with RuPaul's Drag Race star Kerri Colby, shot by photographer Thom Kerr with behind-the-scenes documentation by The Cobrasnake. Dunbar headlined sold-out shows at The Echo in Los Angeles, Elsewhere in New York, and Colours Hoxton in London, describing the era's small-venue shows as deliberately transformed into wild house parties complete with dress codes. He relocated from New York to Los Angeles that November. The non-album single "Take It Slow" followed in 2024, and "Late to the Party" arrived February 21, 2025, his most recent official release at the time of this writing.

Sound, Image, and Influences

Dunbar has named Lady Gaga as his single most formative influence, returning repeatedly to her Artpop era as both his production education and the source of his governing aesthetic idea, which he calls "controlled eccentricity," a deliberate collision of kooky and classic. He pairs a cropped Margiela blazer and Margiela Tabi shoes with thrifted pieces across the Beep Beep Repeat visuals, describing the tension of his image as super-classic formal menswear set against really gay music, summarizing his own visual as a guy with an afro and mustache in a suit singing about a gay bar and gay people. David Bowie and Prince round out his stated touchstones for a loud-and-proud, never-play-it-safe artistic posture, and he has welcomed being grouped with contemporaries like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Charli XCX as part of a broader return of maximalist fun to pop music. His stated tastes beyond pop skew toward British art rock and disco or bloghouse revivalism, citing Elton John, Chic, ABBA, Baccara, and King Krule.

Dunbar functions as his own primary songwriter and producer on the large majority of his catalog. He has described keeping a deliberately close-knit circle, saying he doesn't have hella people around him, maybe one or two people he shares every plan with, and Billboard has noted he handles so much of the writing and production himself that collaborators need to fully understand his vision before he cedes creative control.

Los Angeles and the Bedroom-Pop Peer Circle

Dunbar's DIY, self-produced origin story, teaching himself an entire production suite off pirated software and a bedroom setup, has itself become a reference point for younger artists who came up in the same 2019-2020 wave of teenage bedroom-producer culture. Swiss artist Julia Alexa has directly cited Dunbar, alongside Clairo, Joji, and Conan Gray, as a formative early influence on her dreamy pop sound.

Dunbar's move first to New York and then, in November 2023, to Los Angeles put him inside a loose, hangout-driven network of young queer and alt-pop artists working the same circuit of small venues and shared apartments. During a period when the LA-based artists Amelia Moore and David Hugo lived together with Christian Gates in the same Los Angeles house, Dunbar was a frequent visitor, and playing Super Smash Bros. together became a recurring ritual among the group. The anecdote is a small but telling marker of the social fabric around the early-2020s LA bedroom-to-buzz pop scene that Dunbar, Moore, and Gates, born the same year, all passed through on the way to their respective careers.

Business, Publishing, and the Onion Boy Dispute

Before his major-label deal, Dunbar released balloons don't float here through a distribution arrangement with Platoon, the artist-services company later acquired by Apple. He signed to RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, in October 2019, and every subsequent release, isaac's insects, evil twin, Banish the Banshee, and Beep Beep Repeat, carries that imprint.

In February 2025, Dunbar's team secured a songwriting-credit correction after alleging that Korean singer-songwriter Olivia Marsh's track "Backseat" plagiarized his 2019 song "Onion Boy," his highest-streaming track. Marsh's agency, MPLIFY, publicly acknowledged the claim and added Dunbar to the official songwriting credits for "Backseat" along with negotiated royalty shares, concrete evidence of active publishing-rights management around his back catalog even as his specific publishing administrator has not been independently confirmed.

Timeline

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Isaac Dunbar his real name?

Yes. He records and performs under his given name, with no stage-name substitution.

When was Isaac Dunbar born?

March 17, 2003. This date is corroborated across multiple independent sources and aligns with his own account of moving to New York City two days after his 18th birthday in the summer of 2021.

Where is Isaac Dunbar from?

He was born in Rhode Island but did most of his growing up in Barnstable, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which he names as his hometown in official RCA materials.

Is Isaac Dunbar signed to a major label?

Yes. He has been signed to RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, since October 2019, when he was 16.

Does Isaac Dunbar produce his own music?

He is the primary songwriter and producer on the large majority of his catalog, occasionally bringing in outside collaborators such as Leland, JT Daly, Uffie, and Sizzy Rocket on select tracks.

What is Isaac Dunbar's connection to Christian Gates?

During a period when the LA artists Amelia Moore and David Hugo shared a house with Christian Gates, Dunbar was a frequent visitor, and the group's regular Super Smash Bros. sessions became a running ritual, placing him within the same loose early-2020s Los Angeles alt-pop peer network as Gates.

Streaming Snapshot

As of an April 2025 Spotify snapshot via Kworb.net, Dunbar's catalog had accumulated more than 180.8 million cumulative streams across 33 tracked songs, with roughly 165 million of those from solo tracks without features.

Discography

Further Reading

Isaac Dunbar's arc, from a bullied Cape Cod kid pirating FL Studio at a Barnes & Noble to a GLAAD-recognized RCA artist, runs parallel to a broader wave of self-taught bedroom producers who found audiences online before industry attention arrived, a lineage that also touches artists like Julia Alexa. His time inside the early-2020s Los Angeles alt-pop scene brushes against the wider circle documented on Christian Gates's own page, though Dunbar's career, built on his own catalog, his own coming-out songs, and his own GLAAD nomination, stands apart from any single peer connection.