The rise and rise of Ruel: ‘Fame gives you the worst main character syndrome’

There are parts of Ruel van Dijk’s family home that feel normal: the Cyanide & Happiness book by the toilet, the Liverpool FC figurines on his desk, the photographs of mum, dad and a trio of siblings on the wall. But there are others that betray the fact that the 20-year-old who lives here has had something of an extraordinary early life – for instance, the framed platinum record in his music studio (a converted storage room out the back), or the NDA I had to sign to get the address to be here today.

As Ruel – who is known mononymously – sees it, compared to other young pop stars, he’s actually had a pretty regular time.

“Every other artist my age I know was taken out of school in year seven or eight and homeschooled – just completely ripped out of society to focus on their career,” he says, sitting in the living room of his parent’s waterfront property. “When I came home [from tour], I would go back into school and a regular routine and friend group, and have that whole normal life after this insane other world that I was living in.”

Ruel van Dijk in his Sydney home.

Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Insane is a good way to describe it. After beginning his music career aged 13, today he is one of the biggest artists in Australian pop music, with over 2bn streams on his music, a following of 1.2m on Instagram and countless fervent online fanclubs who track his every move, and create mashup videos about his height (a towering 198cm) and boyish good looks (blond, floppy haired). By age 16, he’d earned that platinum record in the studio, been described by Elton John as an “astonishing” talent, and picked up an Aria award for breakthrough artist, making him the youngest person to ever do so. And now poised to release an anticipated debut album full of emotive, FM radio-friendly songs that put his velveteen vocals front and centre, the Sydney-based artist is on the precipice of even greater fame.

But if you haven’t heard of him, it’s probably because you’re not a teenage girl – the demographic who lines up outside his gigs hours before the doors open, and sing along so loudly you can’t actually hear Ruel himself. At a February gig in Manila – the Philippines is one of his biggest markets outside Australia – the crowd turnout was so treacherously large that Ruel and his team had to be escorted out of the venue by police. Surely it’s been a strange way to grow up?

“I mean, I was an attention seeker, so I was loving it,” he laughs, with the sort of relaxed confidence he carries through our hour-long conversation. “All the craziness and the pandemonium that came with it shows and stuff – that was strange. But in general, having more people listening to my music and come to the shows … it was a great feeling.”

At 14, Ruel was flown around the world to court a label – which he describes as ‘terrifying’.

Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Ruel has always enjoyed singing and playing guitar. When preschool aged, he moved from London to Sydney with his family, a creative bunch who are “all very happy to get up on stage” (one sister is a screenwriter, the other a stylist). His father runs an advertising company that creates radio ads and, at age 12, Ruel convinced his dad to let him use the recording studio to make a demo track. A year later, his dad passed that demo on to a music manager he met through work – Nate Flagrant, who took Ruel on as a client.

After a viral Triple J cover, an early hit single called Golden Years and a Beats By Dre advertising sync that helped him reach new audiences, at age 14 Ruel flew around the world to perform for various record labels courting a deal – a “terrifying” experience, but one that killed his stage fright. Eventually, he signed with the US label RCA Records and put out a trio of EPs over the following years.

His parents tried to keep him in school as long as was feasible, with his mum initially accompanying him on tours that would take him out of school for weeks at a time. Once things got “impossible”, he withdrew at the end of year 11 – spelling the end to that relative normality. “So I didn’t do year 12,” Ruel says, gasping performatively. “How crazy!”

The debut album was meant to come out in 2020, but the pandemic got in the way – a delay which found Ruel reimagining what it could look like. He had already written “so many songs” about the small number of relationships he’d been in; now two years into dating his current girlfriend, he was finding it hard to pen more break-up tunes.

When you’re on tour, it does feel like everything is about you. It’s a dangerous feeling

He was, however, watching a lot of 90s movies, and kept coming back to one in particular – The Truman Show, about an insurance salesman who slowly comes to realise his entire life is being filmed for a TV show of which he’s the star. Ruel found himself wanting to write soundtracks to scenes in that film, and built the album around the concept of breaking the fourth wall and stepping out into the real world from behind the screen. He is aware that movie resonated because of the spotlight he grew up in, and that fame can stoke the embers of feeling like everything’s about you – giving you, in his words, “the worst, most intense, main character syndrome”.

“It’s so hard to get away from that and I’ve got the best friends and family in the world to be like, ‘dude, this isn’t all about you’. And I’m like, OK good,” he says. “Because when you’re on tour, it does feel like everything is about you – everyone around you is working for you, every person at the show is there to see you and everyone’s singing along to lyrics you wrote. Like, that is so weird and it can be so damaging to someone’s humility. So it’s a dangerous feeling, but I was tapping into that.”

Ruel is excited about “finally” releasing the album, titled 4th Wall; after years of delays, it feels like handing in an assignment that’s past overdue. He is trying to not put too much pressure on the next chapter.

“I’m only 20. I wouldn’t feel like I had no purpose without music, because I think most people my age don’t know what they’re doing, or they tried something and it didn’t work out. There’s so much trial and error to go for people my age,” he shrugs. “I would have no fear if everything fell apart now.”

• 4th Wall by Ruel is out now