Feng

From a Purley poolside to a borrowed copy of FL Studio

Travas Alan Feneley was born in Croydon, south London, on 31 March 2006, half-English and half-Filipino, and spent his teens doing almost none of the things that usually precede a headline tour. He played midfield for his secondary school. He lifeguarded in Purley, cut video, and sat through an internship he later summed up as sending emails and wasting his time. The musical education came from two much older brothers, who pushed Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky and Tyler, The Creator at him; one of them handed over a copy of FL Studio while he was still at college.

He began producing in 2019 and, instead of hiding the apprenticeship, filmed it. A YouTube channel documented him learning FL Studio and then BandLab, recording into an iPhone through cheap wired earphones. A breakup at school gave the beats something to carry, and the instrumentals turned into songs with his own voice on them. His first single as a rapper arrived in August 2024.

What the Feng, and the year the numbers caught up

The run of early singles — "M.I.A.", "Walk in the park", "Damn Phone", "Princess", "Kids from the West" — built a following before any label was involved. What the Feng, self-released on 14 February 2025, collected the method: glossy synthesisers, hyperactive 808s, lyrics about self-acceptance, and tracks that frequently stop at around a minute. The FADER, Pitchfork and Complex all took notice.

The look arrived fully formed alongside the music: skinny jeans, Vans, tie-dye, beaded necklaces, a rainbow scarf. He has been explicit that it is a reaction rather than a costume. "Everyone's wearing black or they're doing a gothic theme," he told The FADER in February 2026. "Let me be the complete opposite. Because that's who I am." The same piece has him arguing that people do not need to be told what to do, they need to be inspired — which is roughly the thesis of every song he writes.

By the time Dazed spent a night with him in January 2026 he had moved to West LA and was at two million monthly Spotify listeners. He was still making records the same way, on BandLab with improvised gear, and dismissive of the alternative: "I don't need to use their studios." His parents, he said, only found out he was rapping when it turned up on TikTok.

Weekend Rockstar: a major-label move and a split verdict

Weekend Rockstar came out on 13 February 2026 on Regularisperfect, with The FADER reporting that he had signed to Universal Music Group for it. There are no guest features. The Parisian producer Bilal Hamdi is the only significant outside hand, co-producing around Feng's own work, and the record trades the Croydon bedroom for a Los Angeles that he described to Dazed as living inside the TV shows he watched as a kid. "Cali Crazy", "Superstar", "Firework", "F'd Up", "Wasted Youth" and "XOXO" are the load-bearing tracks.

He had predicted in January that it would be the best album of 2026. NME's Alex Rigotti was not persuaded, writing that the album "is let down by his own standards", that "like his new home, the music rings hollow", and picking out lazy similes, puny brags and profundity as deep as a puddle delivered in a monotonous drone. No star rating was attached. Other reviewers landed nearer the middle, finding the unpretentiousness genuinely disarming even where the writing was thin.

The industry verdict was less equivocal. He entered 2026 at the top of The FADER's Artists to Watch list and joined its GEN F class on 11 February, with parallel placements from Complex, Pigeons & Planes and Ones To Watch, whose Top 30 for the year included him. He appears in Vans' "Off The Wall" campaign, and has picked up co-signs from Kid Cudi and Skrillex — the latter having been openly solicited, after Feng complained to Dazed about the quality of unofficial remixes of his songs: "I need Diplo, I need Skrillex remixing my shit."

Camp Lakepine, and the diary turn

The follow-up came quickly and deliberately smaller. Summer at Camp Lakepine, released on 21 August 2026, runs seven tracks — "Fake Friends", "2023 Summer", "Coachella", "Smile Through The Pain", "Diary", "Vomit", "Lets Make Out" — and was made with a single collaborator, the producer Lakepine. It was written and recorded nomadically across Los Angeles, again on BandLab and wired earphones, covering a stretch of early 2026 in something close to diary form.

"Fake Friends" announced it; "Coachella", built on hard bass, crystalline keyboards and chanted vocals, was pushed as the lead. The framing is a step off the album's balcony-and-bottle-service setting and back towards the interior monologue that got him noticed, and it landed three weeks before the European leg of the tour opened.

Where he stands, September 2026

The touring year began with his Rolling Loud debut in Orlando in May 2026 and moved straight into a North American headline run that sold out — The Pearl in Vancouver on 19 May, Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 23 May, the 650-capacity Loft in Atlanta on 3 June, The Atlantis in Washington on 5 June. The festival summer followed: Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash in Bridgeview on 13 June, Openair Frauenfeld's Park Stage on 10 July, CLOUT Festival in Warsaw on 11 July.

The current leg opened at Le Trabendo in Paris on 8 September and has already taken in Feierwerk's Hansa 39 in Munich on 10 September, Rock Café in Prague on 11 September and Columbia Theater in Berlin on 12 September. Ahead of him are Amsterdam's Tolhuistuin on 14 September, Le Botanique in Brussels on 15 September and Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld in Cologne on 16 September, before the British and Irish dates: Electric Bristol on 18 September, O2 Academy2 Birmingham on 19 September, Vicar Street in Dublin on 21 September, New Century Hall in Manchester on 23 September, Project House in Leeds on 24 September, Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow on 25 September, Concorde 2 in Brighton on 27 September and Electric Brixton in London on 29 September. The run closes in Warsaw on 1 October.

Two things sit oddly together at this point in his career. The records are being argued about, sometimes harshly. The rooms are not — they are a step up in size on almost every market from last year, and they are selling through.

On stage

The show is short, dense and built around the fact that his songs are short. At The Pearl in Vancouver on 19 May the set ran fifty minutes from 8.20pm to 9.10pm and contained twenty-four songs, six of them live debuts that night — "Best Friend", "Running Wild", "Firework", "Cali Crazy", "Don't Be Normal" and "J*b" all got their first airing on the same stage. The shape has held since: an opening of "XY", "When I met you" and "Metamorphosis", a middle stretch that folds Weekend Rockstar material in among the 2024–25 singles, and "Princess" and "XOXO" at the end.

Production is minimal and the crowd does a lot of the work. In San Francisco the audience sang the set back word for word, chanted him out for an encore, and got "XOXO" a second time with fans pulled up onto the stage for it. The Atlanta room was overwhelmingly young and came to the show through TikTok rather than radio; the photographer Isaac Buitrago, who covered it, put the appeal down to the music feeling inclusive, raw and relatable rather than to any stagecraft. Electric Brixton lists the London date at 7pm, ages 14 and over, with special guests still unnamed as of mid-September.