Nine Million Listeners, a Room That Holds 1,500, and a Setlist That Skips Four Albums.

Our United States chart put Current Joys third this week, at 88.9 out of 434 scored American artists, on the strength of an Instagram account that went from 176,829 followers on 1 June to 192,464 on 24 August. Over the same window our desk logged 7,686 tracked events in American venues. Our appearance registry holds no dated show for him at all.

He is not in America. Tonight he is at KOKO in Camden, a room of about fifteen hundred, sold out; on Thursday Dublin, Saturday Glasgow, Sunday Manchester, and next Tuesday the tour closes in Paris. There is no 2026 North American headline leg at all — one American date this year, a festival in Chicago in July. The chart found him in the United States because that is where his profile is registered. The work is on another continent.

THE ARITHMETIC OF THE ROOM

Now the number that makes this worth a page. His Spotify profile carries 9,461,640 monthly listeners. Tonight's room holds about fifteen hundred. The five UK, Irish and French rooms on this leg add up to five thousand seven hundred and eighty seats and standing places between them — so his monthly listeners outnumber the entire European leg's capacity by more than sixteen hundred to one. Selling out KOKO every night, he would need something like seventeen years to put one month's listeners through the door.

That gap is not unusual for a streaming-era artist, and on its own it is a statistic rather than a story. What makes it one here is where the streams actually sit. His five most-played tracks account for a little over three quarters of his entire recorded career on the platform — and every one of them predates his 2021 signing to Secretly Canadian. Four of them come from a single album, Wild Heart, which he recorded and released himself on 2 January 2013 under the name TELE/VISIONS. Those four alone are close to half his catalogue's lifetime streams. His fourth most-played song is a Grimes cover.

And then there is what he plays. The full setlist from Berlin on 18 August runs twenty songs. Not one of them comes from any of the four albums Secretly Canadian released. The encore is Chaos, Fear, A Different Age and Home; the climax before it is five songs off the 2013 bedroom record. An artist whose label years are absent from both his streaming top ten and his own stage.

WHAT HE IS DOING ABOUT IT

The answer, as of twelve days ago, is that he has left. On 13 August he announced ROSEBUD, out on 6 November, self-released through an imprint of his own — the first record he puts out after several years on Secretly Canadian — and shared a single, “HOLE”. Eight of the twenty songs in that Berlin set appear on none of his released albums, which points at the new record, though no tracklist is published and we are not going to claim it.

There is a second act to compare him against, and it belongs to him too. He drums and sings in Surf Curse, whose “Freaks” went viral on TikTok in 2021, was reissued by Atlantic, reached the American rock top ten and is certified three times platinum. Surf Curse has played no shows in 2026. The project with the platinum single is idle; the project with no charting single is the one crossing Europe.

One more thing our own trade should note. His own TikTok account has 22,258 followers — roughly one for every four hundred and twenty-five monthly listeners. Whatever moves his songs on that platform, it is not him.

WHAT WE ARE NOT TELLING YOU

We cannot tell you how any of it sounds. We were in none of these rooms, we have conducted no interview, and every quote we considered came from somebody else's, so we have used none. We hold no view on the music and make no claim about him as a person.

Our own file failed twice on this piece, and both failures are worth printing. It holds not one dated appearance for an artist who has been on the road across Australia, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain this year — because our registry is built from what venues and artists post about each other, and this circuit does not feed it. And the listings source we cross-checked against omits his Glasgow show on Saturday entirely; we found it on the venue's own page. A ledger that misses a 750-capacity room in a city it covers is not a ledger you should read as a census.

The streaming figures here are read from a public mirror of Spotify's data rather than from Spotify, whose pages do not serve numbers to anyone reading them automatically. The capacity figures come from the venues where the venues publish them, and from secondary sources for Dublin and Paris, which do not. Where our sources disagreed — the Dublin show was advertised as sold out and is now showing limited availability — we have printed the current state and said what changed.

1Slayyyter90.5

2Benise89.4

3Current Joys88.9

4yearn88.8

TOP 4 OF 434 SCORED · RISING THRESHOLD 85

Ground Frequency Data Desk — North America. "Current Joys leads United States at 88.9." GF Rising, 2026-W35. https://www.groundfreq.com/charts/rising/united-states/2026-W35/

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GROUND FREQUENCY DATA DESK — NORTH AMERICA EDITED AND SIGNED OFF BY RICHARD SONG 2026-08-25 WHY WE BYLINE DESKS →

@currentjoys · PROFILE IMAGE, MIRRORED

The largest scored pool on the site, and the noisiest: momentum here has to clear a much higher bar to register. This is an organisational byline, not a person pretending to be local — drafted from a locked extract, fact-checked against it, and signed off by a named human editor. The North America desk · Corrections