Yung Pepp

Plagwitz, football pitches and a father in the rap scene

Yung Pepp is a 17-year-old rapper from Leipzig-Plagwitz, a west-Leipzig district of tower blocks, sports grounds and converted industry. He goes by Pepe in public and keeps his surname out of print. Music was in the house before it was a career: his mother teaches singing, his father has been active in Leipzig's rap scene, and he started making tracks himself at twelve.

The first release came a year later. An EP called 13, put out in 2022 when he was thirteen, established the pattern he has stuck to since — write with the producer Florida Juicy, real name Luka Bodzin, and release it himself. There has been no major-label signature at any point. German press interviewing him in July 2026 reported that staying independent was partly practical, since a minor's contracts run through his parents, and partly deliberate.

The geography matters to the songs more than the genre tag does. Promoters describe his stories as taking place where plenty of people grew up, between football pitches, blocks of flats and the streets of Plagwitz, and the writing stays at that scale: a childhood recalled in specifics rather than a persona assembled for streaming. The German music press has filed him under indie-rap; the dpa newswire, covering him in July 2026, argued the sound is closer to modern indie-pop, with guitars and wide, unhurried beats under the raps.

The records: a 1.5 million-stream single and a producer partnership

The run that got him noticed is a sequence of 2025 singles rather than one viral explosion. "Junge Träume aus Gold" passed a million views on Instagram. "Wassereis", released on 27 June 2025, is the one that travelled furthest on streaming, with roughly 1.5 million Spotify plays by the summer of 2026 — modest numbers next to German chart rap, but accumulated steadily and without paid push. "Superstar", "Kopfkino" and "Spiderman" followed through the rest of 2025.

Florida Juicy has produced almost all of it, and the partnership has run for several years now. The production puts indie guitar figures over clean, roomy drums, which is what lets the same catalogue work both at a festival mid-afternoon and in a 300-capacity club. In May 2026 he broadened the circle slightly, cutting "ganz oben" with the rapper Kid Kapri, followed by the single "1000 Tage".

The title single "LAUT SEIN (IMMER)" arrived on 3 July 2026, two minutes long, credited to yung pepp and Florida Juicy and released under his own name rather than a label imprint. The full LAUT SEIN (IMMER) record, eight tracks and the same joint credit, landed in the summer that followed and is his first body of work bigger than an EP. The distributor recordjet, which handles his releases, made him its artist of the month in August 2026.

On 29 April 2026 he recorded a stripped-back Day & Night Session for the German music site Diffus, playing "Wassereis" and "Spiderman" — a useful document of what the songs sound like without the band, and of how much of the appeal rests on the writing.

2025–26: the rooms got bigger very fast

His first headline show of any kind was on 13 September 2025, an open-air set on the roof terrace of Moritzbastei in Leipzig. All 900 tickets went.

January 2026 brought the first proper tour, titled — with some self-awareness — "die noch nicht ganz so große kleine Tour", the not-yet-quite-so-big little tour. Three of the dates sold out quickly. The Munich stop at Milla Club on 18 January went on sale at €22.50 in advance, doors at 18:30; the Cologne show at Helios 37 on 25 January ran to thirteen songs.

March put him in arenas as a support act: the PSD Bank Arena in Nuremberg on 19 March, Freiburg's Sick-Arena on 20 March and the Hallenstadion in Zurich on 21 March, playing eight-song sets of twenty-five to thirty minutes. Over the past two years he has opened for Kraftklub, Clueso, Jassin and 01099.

The largest stage so far was Kraftklub's first stadium concert, at the Rudolf-Harbig-Stadion in Dresden on 27 June 2026, in front of 32,000 people. He opened the bill at 18:45, ahead of Blond. The reviewer for Paranoyd noted that he looked taken aback by how many people were already at the barrier that early, then won the crowd over quickly — "the perfect start", in that write-up, to a long evening.

A summer of festivals, and a political line he keeps repeating

Promoters billed eighteen festival appearances for summer 2026; the dpa report put the figure at around twenty. The documented run includes Campus Festival in Halle on 18 June, Oben Ohne Open Air on Munich's Königsplatz on 25 July, where he played thirteen songs between 15:35 and 16:15, Sound of the Forest at Oberzent at the turn of July and August, MS Dockville in Hamburg on 14 August, Highfield at the Störmthaler See on 15 August, and Superbloom in Munich on 30 August. He has now played splash!, Germany's main rap festival, twice.

The slots were small and early — Highfield's Club Stage at 14:15, Superbloom's NeoNeo Stage at 16:35 — and that is precisely what the festival reviews picked up on. Radio:Active's Highfield write-up grouped him with Vicky, Raum27, Ritter Lean and Das Lumpenpack as proof that a festival does not run on headliners alone, and suggested the accuracy with which he captures how his generation currently lives should earn him better slots at bigger events.

The lyrics carry an explicit politics: anxiety about war and crisis, the ordinary business of growing up, and opposition to the rise of the far right in eastern Germany. Asked about it in July 2026, he said he sees himself as a messenger, because he has a platform, he understands how a lot of young people feel, and the fact that anyone listens to him at all is not something he takes as given. Outside music, he has picked up public backing from the comedians Kurt Krömer and Enissa Amani, and runs with a peer group of younger German acts including Filow, Ritter Lean, Savvy and Kasi.

Where he stands in October 2026

He is listed as an ARD New Music Hotlist artist, the German public broadcasters' selection of acts they consider the most promising voices in the country, and he is still releasing without a label.

The current business is "Die große kleine Tour 2026" — eleven dates, all in Germany, all in clubs. It opened at Studentenzentrum Engelsburg in Erfurt on 10 October and runs through Stuttgart on the 11th, the Orangehouse at Feierwerk in Munich on the 12th, the Roter Salon at Nuremberg's Z-Bau on the 13th, Waldsee in Freiburg on the 16th, artheater in Cologne on the 17th, Zoom in Frankfurt on the 19th, Lux in Hannover on the 20th, Betty in Hamburg on the 22nd and Modus in Berlin on the 23rd, with doors at 18:00 and an early 19:00 start.

It finishes at home, in the Werk 2 complex in Leipzig on 24 October, at €26.90 including fees. That one is sold out, with the venue warning plainly that nothing will be held back for the box office.