Ruel

Sydney’s RUEL joins us for a Mood on the Roof that, for once, happens under the roof, a secret YouTube Music Nights show in our warehouse, played in the round to a sweat-soaked crowd getting Kicking My Feet & Screaming at point-blank range.

YouTube Music Nights is YouTube’s own run of shows for dedicated fans, the series that took Bleachers home to the Stone Pony and Kacey Musgraves to Gruene Hall, and for the Sydney leg we left the skyline out of it and took the whole thing into the room under our studio, somewhere we’d wanted to get grimy for ages.

Ruel’s team turned up picturing the same room we were, a 90s New York basement show of the kind that only survives now on a camcorder tape, and they kept coming back to the All-American Rejects’ House Party Tour, more than a year of the band playing living rooms and skating rinks because Tyson Ritter reckoned live music shouldn’t be “a District 1 Hunger Games luxury”.

RUEL was fourteen when he became the youngest artist ever to play triple j’s Like A Version, singing Jack Garratt’s “Weathered”, and nearly ten years later he comes down the stairs from our roof into a warehouse rammed wall to wall for a secret YouTube Music Nights show, his first time on Mood on the Roof.

His dad sent M-Phazes a demo of him covering James Bay’s “Let It Go” back in 2015, and M-Phazes has been in the studio with him ever since, from “Dazed & Confused”, which Ruel wrote at fifteen in the front room of an Airbnb in LA and which made him the youngest solo artist ever to win an ARIA, through to “Painkiller”, still his biggest song at close to 350 million Spotify plays with a Denzel Curry remix hanging off it.

He’s based in LA these days, and for the Kicking My Feet era he wrote more than 200 songs, trading the folk records behind his debut for Prince, Tears For Fears, The Blue Nile and Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary” (“I know the album doesn’t actually sound anything like that,” he told Dork). When the songs started showing “two different, almost Polar opposite emotional attitudes”, he split them across two records, putting out Kicking My Feet in October 2025 about falling in love and Kicking My Feet & Screaming this June about everything that comes after, with Kenny Beats, who made Unlocked with Denzel Curry, co-writing a good chunk of it.

The set leans hard on that second record, opening on “Hate Myself” (written with Kenny in about half an hour after five or six hours of getting nowhere) with a camera riding the neck of his guitar, before “Growing Up Is ____” and “Dazed & Confused” go out to the day-ones. Phones stay in pockets all night, and with the light kept tight on Ruel and the front few rows, everyone behind them disappears into the haze and the noise.

He closes on “Don’t Say That”, the song he held back from Kicking My Feet and teased as its 52-second outro, then straps on a Snorricam for “In Your Mind” so the camera stays locked on his face while the whole room swings around behind him. “I’ve always been an attention seeker,” he told Dork in June, “and playing live is all the attention I can get. I just love it.”

This October he takes the new record through the UK and Europe, and in November he’s back home in Australia, touring with another one of Mood on the Roof’s alumni, Benson Boone. Ruel will be joining Benson on all nine of his Australian stadium shows.