Ruel

A London birth certificate and a demo his father posted off

Ruel Vincent van Dijk was born on 29 October 2002 in Isleworth, west London, to an English mother and a Dutch-born father. The family moved to Sydney in 2006, when he was three. The turn came in 2015: his father sent a demo of the boy singing to the Australian producer M-Phazes, who took it seriously. The pair made 'Golden Years', released in April 2017, and by June that year Ruel was in a triple j studio recording a Like a Version session at 14 — the youngest performer the segment had taken. RCA signed him internationally that November.

What followed moved quickly even by teen-signing standards. At the 2018 ARIA Awards he won Breakthrough Artist for 'Dazed & Confused', the youngest person to take the category. In 2019 came an MTV Europe Music Award for Best Australian Act and a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award, plus two sold-out nights in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall — again the youngest to do it. Support runs with Khalid and Shawn Mendes filled the space between his own headline dates.

Three EPs, and a debut album that took six years

The records came in short instalments rather than statements: 'Ready' in June 2018, 'Free Time' in September 2019, 'Bright Lights, Red Eyes' in October 2020. Each tracked the voice settling — the falsetto that got him noticed at 14 sat lower and steadier by 20 — but none of them was an album, and the gap between his first single and his first full-length ran to almost six years.

'4th Wall' finally arrived on 3 March 2023 and reached number three on the ARIA chart. It read as a clearing-out record: the writing turned on what the attention of the preceding five years had done to him rather than on the romances that had powered the EPs. It also marked the point where the framing changed. After '4th Wall' the coverage stopped leaning on his age, which had been the story for the better part of a decade.

Kicking My Feet, and the decision to write the other half later

'Kicking My Feet' came out on 17 October 2025 through Recess Records and Giant Music, and peaked at number six on the ARIA chart. It was rolled out slowly: 'I Can Die Now' on 18 July 2025, 'The Suburbs' on 22 August, 'Wild Guess' on 26 September, 'Not What's Going On' on release day itself, and 'Destroyer' on 5 December. Production was spread across Julian Bunetta, Kenny Beats, Ammo, M-Phazes, Dan Wilson and Leroy Clampitt, among others.

The reception was the best of his career to that point. Matthew Dwyer in PopMatters scored it 8/10, crediting him with a 'sharp take on an existing formula' that let him 'stand out in a crowded field of male pop stars' and noting that he had 'struck an innate balance between fame and privacy'. The same publication placed it 22nd in its 25 best pop albums of 2025. On 9 December 2025 he played the Sydney Opera House Forecourt — the outdoor space, a decade on from the demo tape and six years on from the Concert Hall nights.

The record was deliberately one-sided. Ruel has described 'Kicking My Feet' as the infatuation half, the part where he was, in his words, 'leaning into the cringe'. The other side of the same relationship was already written.

The sequel: Kicking My Feet & Screaming

'Kicking My Feet & Screaming' landed on 12 June 2026, again on Recess Records and Giant Music — ten new tracks running 30 minutes and seven seconds. The streaming edition folds in the 2025 album for a 21-track, hour-long sequence, which is the form most listeners will have met it in. Joel Little produced alongside M-Phazes, Julian Bunetta, Ammo, John Ryan, Dan Wilson, Kenneth Blume, Lucy Healey and Mark Schick. Four singles preceded or accompanied it: 'Don't Say That' on 20 March 2026, 'Hate Myself' on 24 April, 'Debbie Don't Cry' on 22 May and 'Faking Smiles' on release day.

Ruel calls it a sequel but not a story, telling Billboard that 'I wouldn't say there's a super clear narrative that goes between them'. The thread is emotional rather than chronological: the restless, resentful, self-recriminating end of the same infatuation. 'Don't Say That' began as an old discarded idea and was rebuilt with Little and Sean Douglas until, by his account, it became one of his favourites of anything he has written.

Harry Shaw gave the album 4/5 in Dork, writing that 'these songs rarely look away from heartbreak, regret and self-doubt' and calling it 'sincere and packed with big choruses' — while flagging how narrow that thematic range is across ten tracks. triple j made it a Feature Album. Commercially it did not match the first half: number 25 on the ARIA chart and number 24 in New Zealand, against the parent album's number six, which is the usual fate of a companion release absorbed into a streaming double.

The stage door in the middle of the stage

The Kicking My Feet Tour ran from 9 February to 8 April 2026 across North and South America, billed at 28 dates, and it settled into a consistent shape. The centrepiece of the staging was an elevated door standing mid-stage: Ruel entered through it and it then worked as a prop for instrument changes and guest appearances. The final night, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on 8 April, sold out; openers across the run included Arthur Hill, Chelsea Jordan and Mercer Henderson.

Twenty-seven different songs appeared across that run, but the frame barely moved. Setlist data from twelve of the shows gives a nineteen-song main set opening on 'Only Ever' — used in nine of the twelve — then 'Not What's Going On', 'Dazed & Confused', 'I Can Die Now' and 'Younger' in the first five. 'Painkiller' closed the main set nine times out of twelve, and 'Kicking My Feet' closed every single show. Two covers sit inside it: Mike Reid's 'I Can't Make You Love Me' in the middle third and Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' in the encore. 'Don't Say That' was the most-played song of the run, appearing at seven of fifteen documented dates before the album carrying it had even been released.

Between legs he has worked short sets hard: seven songs at Rough Trade East in London on 17 May 2026, a late slot at the Great Escape in Brighton on 14 May, eight songs at Luxexpo Open Air in Luxembourg on 14 July, and thirteen at the Northcote Theatre in Melbourne on 23 July — a club show in his own country between two international legs.

Where he is now

The Kicking & Screaming UK and EU tour opens at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 1 October 2026 and runs through October across nine countries, taking in SWG3's TV Studio in Glasgow, Electric Brixton in London on 7 October, La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris on 17 October, Cologne on 18 October, Hole 44 in Berlin on 21 October, Warsaw on 23 October, Razzmatazz 2 in Barcelona on 29 October and the Movistar Arena's smaller hall in Madrid on 30 October. Sadie Jean supports on part of the run. These are clubs and small theatres — a deliberate step down in room size from the American theatres and the Palladium.

November flips the scale. Ruel, now based in Los Angeles, joins Benson Boone's Wanted Man Tour for all nine Australian arena shows across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne — the largest rooms he will have played at home, reached as a support act rather than a headliner. It is a reasonable summary of where he sits at 23: big enough to fill European clubs on his own name, not yet big enough to fill Australian arenas without someone else's.