[5] Growing up, he became interested in visual art after taking pictures with his father's camera, and spent extended periods on Flickr and later Tumblr, on the grounds that its contents were annotated with information for further research;[6] he was later inspired to start writing after reading books of poems by artists such as Frank O'Hara and Robert Frost.
[4] He then adopted the stage name "No Rome", based on a common response to him stating that he was starting in the music industry,[2] and with Zeon and Ethan Namoch founded Young Liquid Gang (YLG) in 2012, a collective of musicians, visual artists, photographers, managers, and graphic designers which ran until 2015.
[4] The following year, fed up of carting his MIDI controllers around on buses, he took a job at a call center, staying in post for seven months, and used the proceeds to purchase a digital audio workstation, gear, and private transportation.
[13] Gomez then entered into correspondence with Samuel Burgess-Johnson and sent him his demos, who proceeded to share them with his flatmate Matty Healy, who invited him to London and signed him to his label Dirty Hit.
[19] In January 2020, Gomez announced that he was working on Samantha's TV,[20] a mixtape, which took its name from the character played by Scarlett Johansson in Her;[14] following the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, he was trapped in the country, having visited with the intention of performing at that year's Wanderland Music and Arts Festival.
[21] While there, he aborted the mixtape, and started afresh;[14] he told the Line of Best Fit in December 2021 that he found the lockdown conducive, as previously he had been "ADD-ing all over the place" and unable to focus.
[24] Later that year, Daniel and BJ Burton coproduced Rome's album It's All Smiles,[25] which he named ironically due to its sad lyrics,[26] and which he promoted with a zine comprising photographs taken by Gomez.
[29] On 8 September, he released the Kurisu-produced mixtape Blueboy Must Die,[30] which had been delayed from 28 July 2023,[28] and on 15 December 2023, he and Ocho the Bullet cowrote Josh Cullen's "Get Right", which Gomez also coproduced.