itsK4

About

Keilon David Hobbs (born January 16, 2013), known professionally as itsK4, and credited on earlier releases as K'$tro and K-4, is an American rapper, singer and songwriter from Houston, Texas. He was raised in music some years before he chose it. His father, David Earl Hobbs, records as Spayc3 and is one of three members of the Houston collective AOS (Ace Of Spadez), alongside Chase Stonne, who is also his uncle, and Dom Antoine. Those three were the men he watched do it. With no childcare on session nights, the studio was simply where his son went. His father has been careful to say he never pushed it. "If you want to do basketball, football, whatever," he has said of those years. "I always gave him the freedom to do what he wants." The decision was made at a kitchen table when he was nine. Chase Stonne had brought over a beat and his father was running it back when his nephew interrupted to say he had something. What he delivered was a completed verse, written down in a notebook nobody had asked him to keep. The next morning his father signed him out of school early and drove him to the studio to record it. "My motivation just started there," he has said of that day. The years that followed were unstable. An eviction put the family in their car, then on a relative's floor, then into a long succession of low-rent motels. The rooms had stains ground into the floors, carpet worn through to the backing, and mold in walls they were paying rent on. The blocks around them were worse. A walk to the corner store after dark meant passing dealers working the lot and women working the street, several of whom approached him directly. He had not yet turned eleven. He left for elementary school from those rooms. He wrote through it. His debut single, "Nightmares," featuring AOS, was made during that period and released on January 16, 2024, his eleventh birthday. He has treated the date as his own ever since, following it with "Shine" on January 16, 2025. "Scars," again featuring AOS, arrived that March, and "Turn It Up" in September 2026. Asked about the motels now, he declines to dramatize them. They were crowded, he says, and some nights he could not eat. What he remembers liking was that there were other kids outside to play with, and that going out there cleared his head. His father puts the same trait less gently and more accurately: "You turn coal into diamonds. You may not have the best equipment, you may not have the money, but you can still use what you've got." His method is self-contained. He writes and records first on his phone, working in BandLab, and takes a song as far as he can alone before asking anyone to hear it. Only once he has decided a record has earned the trip does he ask to go to a studio. In the booth he is exacting to the point of stubbornness, running the same line again and again until it sits where he heard it in his head, and pulling finished songs back for revision rather than releasing them early. "Some artists go to a studio," he has said of what separates him. "I was different from the ground up, doing my own thing." The results tend to disorient people. Played at an industry review without his age attached, his music drew the accusation that it had been generated by AI, on the grounds that no thirteen-year-old writes like that. Adults hear their own circumstances in it. He cites Roddy Ricch and Lil Baby, both of whom came up young, alongside older R&B and Michael Jackson. Live, he works a room before he works a stage, moving booth to booth at an event, filming with people and supporting the other performers, so that the front of the crowd already knows him by the time he goes on. He signed to Epik Records in September 2026. Asked what he wanted out of the year ahead, he did not lead with the money. "I don't just want them for the money," he said. "I want them to feel how I am and what I do."