The romantic pull of Los Angeles is no stranger to immortalization in films, books, and pop songs. The perennially sunny city is, afterall, home to much of the entertainment industry. But aside from the starmaker machinery lending some of its whimsy to the city, the hot, hazy sun often illuminates the juxtaposition of the city’s glamour and grit, at once revealing its lush beauty and its unforgiving harshness. For some, this friction creates a dizzying and at times unnerving stay in the city of angels. But for 23-year-old Aussie pop star Ruel, the city provided a backdrop that lent itself particularly well to the creation of a punchy sophomore record.
“I think if you’re in LA, it’s kind of hard to take time off,” Ruel tells Melodic Magazine over a Zoom call in early February, the day after his tour opener in Austin, Texas. “If I was still living in Sydney, I would be doing nothing. I’d be surfing every day, just hanging out with friends, being very unproductive. But living in LA now, it’s like all I want to do is work and keep writing and keep making. I feel the most creative there — or, most inspired.”
After touring his 2023 debut album 4TH WALL, Ruel permanently moved to Los Angeles. Once settled, he spent the next year and a half writing upwards of 200 songs for what would become last October’s Kicking My Feet, an 11-track record that leans into the sweeter, more sincere sides of the singer’s lyricism and details the extremes of infatuation. Now, Ruel is hitting the road again for his Kicking My Feet Tour, which will take him across the globe this spring.
“I moved to LA permanently [at] the start of 2024, and that was kind of what shaped the whole next album,” he says. “It was a lot of time that I was just working every single day, making songs with people and different producers and different writers over a year and a half.”
One of the first songs that took shape during this extended writing process was “The Suburbs,” Kicking My Feet’s second single. The song opens with a dreamy set of falsetto vocal tracks stacked over guitar licks before launching into an infectious chorus about envisioning a domestic future with a romantic interest. “I could see us in thе suburbs / Never thought I’d be that person / But with you, it sounds like paradise,” he sings in the song’s post-chorus. “The Suburbs” functions as a neat case study of Ruel’s strengths as both a writer and vocalist. He effortlessly toggles between heady notes up in the clouds and belts with suave gusto behind them. This song, along with album opener “Only Ever” and “Not What’s Going On” were among the first to secure a place on the eventual record’s final tracklist.
“There [were] so many songs that [I] just kept pulling in,” he says. “I think I had like 20 out of the 200 that [I thought] 100% needed to come out. Then I thought I’d bring it down to 10 just to cut the fat out.” Songs from that fruitful creative period like “Made It Awkward” and “Cats on the Ceiling” didn’t make the cut for the record, but earned a life of their own as singles in 2024.
As a whole, Kicking My Feet displays Ruel’s knack for blending his catchy pop sensibilities with his naturally soulful register. The result is a sweet set of soulful pop songs that lean R&B at times and alternative at other moments.
But long before sophomore albums and headlining tours, Ruel signed his first recording contract with RCA Records at 15 years old. In the years that followed, he gained attention for songs like 2018’s “Dazed & Confused” and 2019’s “Painkiller.” His collaboration “Want U Around” with the similarly soulful Omar Apollo in 2020 was another large entry point for many listeners. In 2023 released his first proper studio album 4TH WALL, which took a kaleidoscopic take on coming of age stories and received positive critical reception.
Kicking My Feet refines Ruel’s sound and plays to his strengths, compiling a set of tight pop songs into a breezy listening experience that doesn’t fall victim to the tropes of easy listening pop. In bringing these songs to the stage for Kicking My Feet’s accompanying tour, Ruel says the fresh nature of the material makes it easy to slip back into the emotional headspace they were written in. “I definitely feel like I try to convey every emotion for the song live, whether it’s happening kind of subconsciously or knowingly trying to do it,” he says. “I think I’ve played the album to [an] audience twice, so those sorts of feelings are coming up still, back to when I wrote them.”
“But I think after playing 70 shows, that’s when it starts to kind of feel a little bit more robotic,” he adds. “You have to find different ways to enjoy them, by [different] arrangements or just changing up things for the fun of it. But right now, I think how they were written is the most fun way to play them.”
Since the full record’s release in October, Ruel has yet to stop creating. Before jumping into tour rehearsals in Los Angeles for much of January, he spent the holidays back home and enjoyed an enviously warm Australian summer. In the midst of preparing for opening night, he says he spent some time writing new music. “I’m not great at writing on the road,” Ruel says. “I’m gonna try my best, but I find it hard to do both at the same time. So I’m happy I got some writing in before tour.”
Most recently, Ruel released Kicking My Feet (Live Sessions), which, as the name indicates, reimagines some of the record’s songs into new live arrangements. One of those new versions is a “Saloon Version” of the album’s most recent single “Wild Guess,” a breezy cut about a breakup. “Oh, out in the wild west/You can keep what you take from me,” he admonishes, “Now I wish you a nice life/Now I won’t be your baby anymore.”
Keeping with the wild west theme, the song’s music video takes a comedic spaghetti western approach to the push and pull of a breakup. Dressed in Western attire, Ruel stars opposite the comic and actress Mary Beth Barone (who some may recognize from Prime’s Overcompensating or her podcast Ride, co-hosted with actor Benito Skinner).
“Boy singers,” Barone said with her signature dry, sarcastic delivery during an episode of her Ride podcast last October. “There is some music I don’t think boys should be allowed to listen to, I wanted to say that. And also, there are some boy singers that have rights, Ruel being one of them… he’s the only one for right now.”
In the video, the duo riff off of one another in between the song’s choruses and verses, making the music video a mini-movie of its own.
“I really wanted to get someone who was a comic from the start,” Ruel says. “I’d rather that than another artist or actor that felt [too] serious…
Keep up with Ruel: Instagram // X // TikTok
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