‘If all I cared about was a career, I'd make listenable music': Joost Klein on Eurovision, scandal and having the last laugh
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.'
His mother passed away after a cardiac arrest a year later and he was raised by his older siblings, whose dates of birth he has tattooed on his knuckles. 'If you lose your parents at a young age there's not a lot that you remember,' he says. 'And the things you do remember become bigger and more powerful in your heart or brain.'
Which is where Eurovision comes in. One of Klein's formative childhood memories was of lying on the couch with his parents and watching Finnish heavy metal band Lordi win Eurovision in 2006. 'I saw the impact Eurovision had on me on that couch. And I thought, for some reason, 'That's maybe how I can use my life.'' Friends warned him about the complicated politics of the event. 'But I was just blind with a melancholy and love for the old Eurovision.'
The reality of taking part in Eurovision was sobering. Some of the international broadcasters' delegations that accompany the artists backstage were acting in a bullying manner, he alleges, with one journalist whipping out his smartphone to film him at the urinals.
'There was no privacy,' he says. 'It was not a safe environment.' Ireland's entry, Bambie Thug, accused Israeli broadcaster Kan of intimidating behaviour. So which delegation filmed Klein at the gents? All he will says is: 'I think everybody knows.' The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) later said it regretted that some delegations 'didn't respect the spirit of the rules'. It has announced new codes of conduct for this year's contest in the Swiss city of Basel, including no-filming zones.
Europapa ends with an outro in which Klein directly addresses his late father. So he says he was in an emotionally vulnerable state as he exited the stage after the semi-final. 'For me, that's not really a nice moment to, I don't know, film somebody.' Sweden's public prosecution service initially said Klein made a movement that hit a female camera operator's equipment, though it closed its investigation last August after concluding that there was no proof the singer had intended to cause 'serious fear'.
What exactly happened? Was there a shove? Klein denies he ever touched the camerawoman, or that he damaged her equipment. 'If that was the case,' he says, 'then there would be a case to be dismissed in the first place.' Klein says he has the footage of the incident filmed by the operator on his phone and might upload it to his YouTube channel one day, insisting it will show 'exactly nothing happened'.
If nothing happened, why was he suspended? He says the EBU has still not explained it to him. Did the geopolitical backdrop of the war in Gaza play a part? In Malmö, there had been protests calling for Israel to be excluded from the event, and at the semi-final press conference, there was a tense moment when a Polish journalist asked the Israeli contestant Eden Golan if her presence at the contest was endangering other acts. The host intervened to say she did not have to answer the question if she did not want to. But Klein, sitting next to Golan with a Dutch flag over his head, piped up: 'Why not?'
Unlike some of the other contestants, Klein says he had not felt an urge to make a statement about the Gaza war. 'I signed up for an apolitical event.' I suggest that the press conference incident still made him come across as a bit of a bully. 'I just said that as the most Dutch person that I am,' he says. 'So someone gets a cookie. Someone else gets a cookie. Someone else – not. Why not? Equality is very important, especially in a competition.' There's a Dutch word for that kind of attitude: a stijfkop or 'stiffhead'. Is Klein stubborn? 'I think stubbornness is necessary in art,' he says. 'You gotta feel your fuel, or else there's no purpose to it all.'
As he describes his experience of Malmö, I am struck by a double bind: Klein is still visibly hurt by what happened, his specs fogging up as he describes his anxiety in the dressing room. But he's also allowing himself to be dragged back, and I am not sure how much he wants to move on.
Indeed, the gabber-fuelled pop-punk opening track of his album is called Why Not, revisiting that press conference. And earlier this month he released a single called United by Music, which was Eurovision's 2024 motto. In it, he and Estonian singer Tommy Cash chant: 'Fuck the EBU, I don't wanna go to court.' He's still smarting from having his privacy invaded, but he also expresses concern that someone is trying to wipe footage filmed off-stage from the internet.
That double bind might be the most zeitgeist-y thing about Klein, and what makes his music resonate so much with Gen-Z's digital natives: memories can never drift off into the distance but always remain a click away in some online archive. Raw and unrefined, gabber-pop may be the Netherland's own version of punk, but for Klein, No Future is not a cry of protest but an admission that the past is all-consuming.
He seems happy to admit it. 'For me,' he says, 'reminiscing is almost a 24/7 thing, and that's not always good. I try to be more in the moment, and I think it's getting better.' He pauses, and adds: 'At least I hope so.'
Joost Klein plays Electric Brixton, London, on 14 March
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