Dom Vallie went from a Kitchener bedroom to a two-time JUNO nominee.

Dom Vallie makes rap that sounds like it was built alone at 3 a.m. and meant to be heard by everyone — and the JUNO Awards agreed, handing the Toronto-born, Kitchener-raised artist a 2023 Rap Single of the Year nomination for “Been Himma.”

Vallie writes, records and directs from the inside out. “Nights,” the 2017 mixtape that opened his catalogue, was the sound of a teenager teaching himself the room. By “Been Himma” he’d turned that self-made instinct into more than five million Spotify streams and a national award nod — and in 2025 the Recording Academy of Canada came back, nominating his project “See You When I See You” for Rap Album/EP of the Year.

A self-made sound, built one late night at a time

The through-line in Vallie’s catalogue isn’t a trend — it’s authorship. He treats melody, cadence and vision as one job, moving between experimental and melodic hip-hop without borrowing anyone else’s blueprint. That’s the rarer thing to platform: not a viral moment, but an artist with a point of view that holds up across a mixtape, a breakout single and an award-nominated EP.

From a Toronto studio floor to a national stage

Vallie is one of the artists in DGTL Season 1 — the creatives who passed through the original DGTL Toronto studio at 487 Adelaide St. West. It’s a community of visual media makers, producers and touring artists, and Vallie is the music end of it: proof that a self-directed record made in a small room can end up on a JUNO shortlist. DGTL is featuring his work here, and pointing its audience toward the real thing — his catalogue, on the platforms below.

The arc — a self-taught debut in 2017, a JUNO-nominated single in 2023, a JUNO-nominated project in 2025 — reads like a plan, not a fluke. That’s the profile worth watching: an artist who keeps leveling up on his own terms.