No terminal on tty1..5 etc

I’m having the issue where if I swap to another tty using Ctrl + Alt + F1…6 I don’t get a terminal and instead only see:

Loading kernal linux ...
Loading inital ramdisk ...

I’m using i3wm setup with lightdm and proprietary nvidia drivers. If I try and disable lightdm (and reboot) I see the exact same messages and the system becomes unusable until I SSH in and start lightdm again.

I’ve tried various grub default settings and looking through the boot log etc to see what’s up but so far nothing.

Not sure how to fix this.