Ruel takes YouTube Music Nights underground at Mood on the Roof
Google and Mude team up for a secret, sweat-drenched Ruel show for YouTube Music Nights, down in the warehouse under Mood on the Roof in Sydney, with fans pressed in on every side and a robot arm carving through the haze over the mosh.
Ruel comes down off the roof into a room that’s already rammed wall to wall, fans stacked in on every side and the front row more or less standing on the kick drum, and by the time the band drops into “Hate Myself” there’s a camera riding the neck of his guitar and a robot arm sweeping through the haze above the pit.
YouTube Music Nights has sent Jack Antonoff home to the Stone Pony with Bleachers and put Kacey Musgraves on the floorboards at Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas, and now it’s pulled up at our warehouse in Glebe for Ruel’s first Mood on the Roof.
We’ve been running Mood on the Roof out of the Mude studio since 2020, and for most of that time the films have lived up on the garden above it, one artist and one take with the skyline of Sydney’s southern CBD in the background, while the warehouse underneath, cyc wall and all, never got a look in.
We’d been itching to shoot something grimier down there for ages, and the first time we sat down with Ruel’s team at Flagrant Artists and the YouTube Music crew, it turned out everyone had the same room in their heads. The references were mostly grainy 90s New York basement shows, the kind that only survive now on camcorder tapes, where the crowd’s so close to the band they end up part of the set.
The one Ruel’s team kept coming back to was the All-American Rejects’ House Party Tour, where the band behind “Dirty Little Secret” spent more than a year playing fans’ living rooms and skating rinks across the States, with Tyson Ritter pitching the whole thing as a swing at ticket prices and saying live music shouldn’t be “a District 1 Hunger Games luxury”.
Ruel was born in London and grew up in Sydney, where at sixteen he became the youngest solo artist ever to win an ARIA, and nearly a decade in he’s past three billion streams with a catalogue that has Denzel Curry on the “Painkiller” remix and a good chunk of the new record co-written with Kenny Beats, the producer behind Denzel’s Unlocked.
That record is Kicking My Feet & Screaming, the darker half of a pair he split out of more than 200 songs, and the set drew on both halves of the pair, with “Dazed & Confused” and “Painkiller” dropped in for the day-ones.
Grungy shows like this usually end up on a shaky handycam, all blown-out highlights and Hi8 wobble, and we wanted that lo-fi, in-your-face feel with proper production hiding underneath it, so the robot arm we rigged for Mood on the Roof Nights came downstairs as the main camera.
Photographer
Leo Kaczmarek
The arm runs off a set of pre-programmed keyframes, and we moved between them live as we vibed out the set with Ruel.
For “In Your Mind”, Ruel strapped on a Snorricam, a rig that came straight out of some Dijon references we’d been trading since the first call. Two Icelandic brothers built the first Snorricam in 1996 for a Maul Girls punk video (Darren Aronofsky later made it a signature in Requiem for a Dream), and with the camera strapped to his chest, his face stays locked dead centre while the whole room swings around behind him.
Getting in was invite-only, fans who’d applied through a questionnaire plus guests from both teams, and everyone was told on the way through the door that this was a film shoot as much as a gig and that phones were staying in pockets, which is about the quickest way we know to get a whole room locked in on the band and feeding off each other.
Photographer
Leo Kaczmarek
The full show is on Ruel’s channel from 2 October at 5pm Sydney time, with standalone cuts of “Faking Smiles” and “In Your Mind” and a run of Shorts dropping over the weeks after, while YouTube Music takes footage from the night to billboards in the US from 15 October.
Ruel spends October carrying the new record through rooms like Electric Brixton in London and La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris, then comes home in November to open Benson Boone’s Australian arena run, three nights of it at Afterpay Arena in Sydney (Benson played our roof back before “Beautiful Things”).
Watch the full show on Ruel’s channel, and there’s more on Ruel and the set on the Mood on the Roof show page. For more on how we film live music, see our pieces on Winston Surfshirt at Mood on the Roof Nights and Gretta Ray for Amazon Music.
Photographer - Leo Kaczmarek
The crew after the shoot
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Frequently Asked Questions
Ruel's YouTube Music Nights show at Mood on the Roof
Ruel played a secret YouTube Music Nights show on Tuesday 25 August 2026 in the warehouse under Mood on the Roof, at the Mude studio on Queen Street in Glebe, Sydney. It was his first Mood on the Roof show, and the first time the series had been filmed downstairs from the rooftop garden where it has run since 2020. The show wasn’t announced publicly, and Ruel played in the round with the crowd on every side of him and his band.
Ruel opened with “Hate Myself”, which he wrote with Kenny Beats in about half an hour. The set drew on both halves of his double album, Kicking My Feet (2025) and Kicking My Feet & Screaming (2026), alongside older singles “Dazed & Confused” and “Painkiller”. It also included “Growing Up Is ____”, “Not What’s Going On”, “I Can Die Now”, “Not Thinkin’ Bout You”, “Destroyer”, “Talking to the Driver”, “You Against Yourself”, “Faking Smiles”, “Don’t Say That” and “In Your Mind”. “Don’t Say That” is the song he held back from Kicking My Feet and teased on that album as the 52-second “DST (Outro)”.
It depends on the show. Ruel’s Sydney YouTube Music Nights show was invite-only. The crowd was fans who applied through a questionnaire plus invited guests, and phones stayed in pockets for the whole show. Other YouTube Music Nights shows have sold tickets, including Kacey Musgraves’ three sold-out shows at Gruene Hall in Texas.
Mude, the Sydney creative studio that runs Mood on the Roof, produced and filmed Ruel’s YouTube Music Nights show, with Google as the client and Ruel’s management, Flagrant Artists, as creative collaborators. The main camera was a D2 Motion STRETCH motion control arm, and Ruel had a camera on his guitar neck for “Hate Myself” and wore a Snorricam for “In Your Mind”. The film was graded black and white, and photography was by Leo Kaczmarek.
Ruel’s YouTube Music Nights show was shot in colour and graded black and white in post-production. The look comes from the references shared between Mude and Ruel’s team from the first meeting: grainy 90s New York basement shows, and the black and white flash photography of Ricky Powell, which was Mude founder Ben Develin’s reference. In black and white, the strobes pick out the sweat on faces in the crowd while the edges of the warehouse fall away into black.
A Snorricam shot uses a camera rig strapped to a performer’s body and pointed back at their face, so their face stays fixed in frame while everything behind them moves. Films use it to show panic or intoxication, and Todd Phillips used it in The Hangover (2009). Icelandic brothers Einar and Eiður Snorri built the first one in 1996 for the Maul Girls music video “Chunky Black Shoes”, and Darren Aronofsky’s π (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) made it famous. Ruel wore a Snorricam for “In Your Mind” at his YouTube Music Nights show in Sydney.
Ruel’s latest album is Kicking My Feet & Screaming, released on 12 June 2026 through Recess Records and Giant Music. It’s the second half of a double album with Kicking My Feet, released on 17 October 2025. Ruel wrote more than 200 songs for the project and started seeing “two different, almost Polar opposite emotional attitudes” in them. Kicking My Feet covers the high of falling in love, and Kicking My Feet & Screaming covers the heartbreak. Producers on the new record include Kenny Beats, Joel Little, Dan Wilson and M-Phazes, and Ruel has named Prince, Tears For Fears, The Blue Nile and Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary” as influences.
The full show is on Ruel’s YouTube channel, released on Friday 2 October 2026 at 5pm AEST as a collaboration between Ruel, YouTube Music and Mood on the Roof, so it also appears on the Mood on the Roof channel. The film is finished in black and white. Standalone performance videos of “Faking Smiles” and “In Your Mind” are coming out in the weeks after, along with YouTube Shorts cut from the night. YouTube Music is also running footage from the show on billboards in the US from 15 October 2026.
YouTube Music Nights is YouTube Music’s series of exclusive live concerts for dedicated fans, with each full performance released on the artist’s Official Artist Channel alongside behind-the-scenes Shorts. Past shows include Bleachers at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Kacey Musgraves at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. Ruel’s secret show in the warehouse under Mood on the Roof in August 2026, produced by Mude, was the second YouTube Music Nights in Australia, after Tash Sultana at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney.
Mood on the Roof is a live music series filmed by Mude on the rooftop garden of its studio in Glebe, Sydney, running since 2020. Each film is usually one artist and one take, with the skyline of Sydney’s southern CBD behind them. Artists who have played it include Benson Boone (before “Beautiful Things”), Griff, Alec Benjamin, Nick Mulvey, Vacations, dodie and grentperez. Mood on the Roof Nights, the edition with a live crowd and a 360-degree robot-arm camera, launched with Winston Surfshirt on 18 June 2026. Brand partners have included YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Vodafone and DistroKid.
A concert in the round has the stage in the middle of the room with the audience on every side, so the show has no front or back. The artist plays to the whole room at once, and the crowd can see each other across the stage as well as the band. Ruel’s YouTube Music Nights show in the warehouse under Mood on the Roof in Sydney was played in the round, with the front row close enough to be standing at the kick drum. For filming, it means there’s nowhere to hide cameras, so the main camera on Ruel’s show was a robot arm working over the crowd.
A motion control camera arm, also called a robotic camera arm or camera robot, is a robotic arm that holds a film camera and moves it along programmed paths. Operators set keyframes and the system plans a smooth path between them, so a move can be repeated exactly or changed on the fly, usually with focus and zoom control built in. The arm on Ruel’s YouTube Music Nights show was a STRETCH from Australian motion control company D2 Motion, which has 1.9 metres of reach and carries camera payloads up to 20 kg. It was the main camera, running off pre-programmed keyframes that the Mude crew moved between live during the set. On Mood on the Roof Nights, the same kind of arm is rigged to sweep 360 degrees over the crowd and the artists.
Yes. Ruel is special guest on all nine dates of Benson Boone’s Wanted Man Tour in November 2026. He plays Brisbane Entertainment Centre on 6 to 8 November, Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 12 to 14 November and Afterpay Arena in Sydney on 17 to 19 November. Before that, he tours Kicking My Feet & Screaming through the UK and Europe in October 2026, including Electric Brixton in London on 7 October and La Machine du Moulin Rouge in Paris on 17 October. Benson Boone played Mood on the Roof before “Beautiful Things” was released.
Ruel (Ruel Vincent van Dijk) was born in Isleworth, London, in 2002 and moved to Sydney with his family in 2006. At 14 he became the youngest artist to play triple j’s Like A Version, covering Jack Garratt’s “Weathered” in June 2017. At 16 he won Breakthrough Artist at the 2018 ARIA Awards for “Dazed & Confused”, making him the youngest solo artist ever to win an ARIA. He has passed three billion streams, and “Painkiller” is his biggest song, with close to 350 million Spotify plays.