Trixie Mattel

Milwaukee, musical theatre, and a second go at Drag Race

Brian Michael Firkus was born on 23 August 1989 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and took a BFA in musical theatre at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is of Ojibwe descent; his maternal grandmother was a member of the Bad River Band. The Trixie Mattel character — exaggerated eyeliner, country-adjacent delivery, a joke always running slightly ahead of the audience — came out of that training rather than around it, and the musical-theatre habit of building a show rather than a set has shaped almost everything since.

Her first run at RuPaul's Drag Race, season seven in 2015, went badly and then unusually well: eliminated in the fourth episode, brought back in the eighth, finished sixth overall. The 2018 All Stars third season settled it. She won, beating Kennedy Davenport in the final lip-sync, and became the first Indigenous winner in the franchise. What followed was less a drag career than a small media company with one performer at the centre of it.

The records, and the turn towards the dancefloor

The music was never a spin-off. Two Birds arrived self-released in 2017, acoustic and plainly written. One Stone followed in 2018 through Producer Entertainment Group and ATO Records. Barbara, in 2020, pushed the folk writing into electronics. Full Coverage, Vol. 1, a covers EP, came in 2021, and The Blonde & Pink Albums in 2022 was a double record leaning on power pop. Across six years that is a working songwriter's output, not a tie-in.

The second strand is the DJ booth. Solid Pink Disco began as a club night and grew into annual mixes and a touring product, with official remixes for Paloma Faith, Wolf Parade, Duran Duran and Jennifer Lopez teaching her the production side. In April 2025 she put out a cover of RuPaul's "Supermodel (You Better Work)" with Vincint and played Coachella. By 2026 the remix work was feeding back into her own songwriting rather than sitting beside it.

The business, and the cost of running it

Trixie Cosmetics, founded in 2019 and still wholly owned by Firkus, is the commercial spine. Trixie Motel, the Palm Springs property she co-owns, became a Discovery+ and Max docuseries that ran from 2022 to 2024. This Is It!, the Milwaukee LGBTQ+ bar she co-owned from 2021, closed permanently in March 2025. Alongside that sat UNHhhh, the eight-season web series with Katya Zamolodchikova that ran from 2016 to 2024 and took a Streamy for unscripted series in 2020, the podcast The Bald and the Beautiful from 2020, two books with Katya — the first a New York Times bestseller in 2020, the sequel in 2022 — and a judging seat on Queen of the Universe from 2021 to 2023.

The reckoning came in July 2024, when she announced a three-month stop. She described developing an autoimmune disorder, along with arthritis and a temporomandibular joint problem, and said the schedule had hollowed out the character: "It is not so fierce to work yourself into an autoimmune disorder," and at a certain point she had started to feel like "a Trixie impersonator". Her YouTube channel ran on pre-recorded material with guest hosts while she was away. Two years later the tone had not entirely lifted. In September 2026 publicity she offered a line with no joke attached: "Everything I ever wanted to do with my career has happened and I'm more unhappy than I've ever been."

'Till Death Do Us Part

The current record started as a private project. Writing in the autumn of 2025, while filming the annual run of Halloween content that occupies her August to October, she found herself with five or six songs that were all spooky and realised she had never made a Halloween album. It was finished by 30 October 2025 and then held for a full year so the release would land in season.

"Ghost on the Moon" came out as a single on 25 September 2026; the six-song 'Till Death Do Us Part followed on 2 October 2026 through PEG Records, with "Vampire" and "I'm in Love with a Ghost" among the tracks. She has described it as "a heartfelt marriage of spooky synths and acoustic love-strumming" — guitar-written, then built out on analogue synthesisers, theremin and arpeggiated bass lines borrowed from 1980s horror scoring. The reference points she names are Scream, The Conjuring and Salem's Lot, and the songs use vampirism and haunting to get at ambition, old relationships and depression rather than for set dressing.

The companion piece premiered on YouTube at noon Pacific on 5 October 2026: a telethon in which Mattel tries to raise money for a Halloween special while a killer stalks the production. She co-directed it with Daniel Vincent Gordh, Katya appears, and the cameos arrive by telephone. She has said she prefers to make music in the context of something like musical theatre, which explains why the album came with a 90-minute comedy horror rather than a video. Next on her own list: a lo-fi hip hop relaxation collection and an instrumental synthwave record.

Where the touring stands

March 2026 brought Super Disco, the successor to Solid Pink Disco and a deliberate escalation: a narrative DJ set in which, by her own description, she is "spinning a narrative where love and humanity prevail over greed and automation", cutting between a dystopian world of automation and a bright surreal one, with Star Trek, The Jetsons and Watchmen in the visual vocabulary and disco, funk and funky house in the crates. It ran through the festival summer — Lightning in a Bottle on 23 May, Bonnaroo on 13 June, Lollapalooza at the end of July, Osheaga on 2 August, Capitol Hill Block Party and Outside Lands on 8 August.

The theatre half has not held. Announced on 9 December 2025 and on general sale from 12 December, The Bald and The Beautiful Live: Very Bald, Very Beautiful was the first seated-theatre tour she and Katya had attempted, selling itself on recording the podcast in front of an audience with PowerPoint presentations in the mix. On 17 September 2026 Katya stepped back, with a statement saying she would be taking time away from projects and live events "so she can prioritize her health following recent medical complications" — no diagnosis, no return date, a full recovery anticipated. The Oakland opening night and the dates behind it went with it. Boston's Wang Theatre run of 1–2 October was postponed, Portland's 19 June date moved to 19 March 2027, and Seattle to 20–21 February 2027, with Austin's Moody Theater on 22 January 2027, Atlanta's Fox Theatre on 23 January and San Jose on 20 March now on the books.

That leaves Mattel working solo through the back end of 2026, which is roughly what she was doing anyway: hosting the Queerty Awards in Los Angeles on 10 March, Pride on the Island in Calgary and Boise Pride over the summer, an appearance on NPR's Wild Card, a remix of Wolf Parade's "I'll Believe in Anything" with proceeds to the LGBTQ+ youth charity Lambert House, a Halloween night dance party at Royale in Boston on 31 October, and a New Year's Eve DJ set at The Anthem in Washington, DC on 31 December.