Joost Klein is arguably the first artist to triumph at the Eurovision song contest without actually performing in the final. In May last year, the 27-year-old Dutch wild child “gabber pop” rapper was disqualified from the world’s largest live music event just hours before he was due to perform Europapa to 170 million TV viewers around the globe.
This song – a chaotic but catchy ode to the father he lost as a teenager, and to the free movement of people ethos his father instilled in him – was touted as a favourite. But instead of gearing up for his big moment, Klein spent seven hours that day sitting in his changing room in a reflex-blue, Ursula-von-der-Leyen-meets-Vivienne-Westwood suit with gigantic shoulder pads, fearing he was about to be arrested – on live TV – over a “backstage incident” after the semi-final the previous evening. Swedish host broadcaster SVT filed a police complaint accusing Klein of “threatening behaviour” by pushing a female camera operator’s equipment. Entertainment careers have been cancelled for less.
Yet now, in the spring of 2025, Klein is celebrating the release of his new album Unity with an 18-stop, 35,000-ticket tour that doesn’t just loop in Friesland and Wallonia but also includes sold-out shows in London and LA – a historic first for someone “yapping in Dutch”, as he puts it. Europapa is diamond-certified in the Netherlands and has racked up 170m streams on Spotify – almost twice as many as the song that officially won Eurovision, Swiss singer Nemo’s The Code.
“People tell me, ‘Oh, this disqualification was actually really good for you, because your career got so big,’” Klein says in a mocking voice, in his first English-language interview since Eurovision came crashing down around him. “But if all I cared about was a career, I would actually make listenable music. I would make music that the masses want to hear. Yet I make what I want to hear. And sometimes that’s what the masses want after all, because zeitgeist works in that way.”
“Unlistenable” is an overstatement, but it’s true that the paradox of Klein’s appeal is that much of his musical output sounds like utter trash at first listen. Gabber is the Dutch variant of hardcore dance music that grew out of Amsterdam and Rotterdam nightclubs in the early 1990s. It means “friend” in Amsterdam slang, but it was never the kind of friend your parents would have considered a good influence. On most of the songs on Unity, a relentless kickdrum beat is distorted and pitched at a breakneck speed of 140-190bpm (Klein says he started to listen to gabber on his one-hour cycle ride to school “because it makes you pedal faster”). The vocals are either sped up to sound like Mickey Mouse, or involve Klein spitting child-like rhyming couplets – “Evil corporations ruling all the nations” – sometimes in English or German but mostly in guttural, rasping Dutch. Unity features a collaboration with German eurodance titans Scooter that is about as aesthetically refined as a wet T-shirt competition in Magaluf.
Yet Klein’s version of happy hardcore is infused with deep sadness: where you expect euphoria, there is melancholy. “I feel like a trampoline, I feel powerless and seething,” Klein mumbled on his first hit single, 2022’s Wachtmuziek. “I feel so, so alone, but I’ve felt that way since I was a child,” he raps on Unity’s Discozwemmen, an unlikely collaboration with 64-year-old Dutch lo-fi rocker Spinvis.
Growing up in the village of Britsum in the Frisian flatlands, Klein started making YouTube videos inspired by Bo Burnham and “Weird Al” Yankovic when he was nine, though his father disapproved and made him delete them. When his father died of cancer when he was 12, “the first thing I did was make 20,000 videos for YouTube with silly dance moves,” Klein recalls. “The internet was the only way out.”