Tilly Kingston today releases her single Youth Is Wasted, following 2023 debut single Best Break Up Ever, which received support from BBC Introducing, has so far racked up 1.4 million YouTube views, and hundreds of spot plays across UK radio stations.
With her hard edged, punk-rock & metal fused pop, Tilly wants to connect with anyone who’s ever felt like a misfit. She explains ‘Youth Is Wasted is a tongue in cheek ‘Piss Off’ to all the people who look down on me and say I am wasting my life and having too much fun. Well if this is wasting my life than fuck yeah, I am, and loving every minute of it!!”
A refreshing, unorthodox counter to the typical pop artist, Tilly Kingston was born for the stage – a good thing, too, seeing as she has spent her whole life sleeping in a bed just a few feet away from one.
Having grown up living above local Feathers music venue in the unassuming city of Lichfield, 15 miles north of the rock’n’roll epicentre of Birmingham, it’s little surprise that the charismatic 18-year-old cannot remember a time when music was not the dominant fixture in her life. With a ‘60s- and ’70s-loving dad, and an older brother obsessed with the punk and emo of the 2000s, her musical education was both thorough and varied, making her a home-schooled student of classic songwriters such as David Bowie and The Beatles as well as of modern-day iconic frontmen like Slipknot’s Corey Taylor and Ghost’s Tobias Forge during field trips to gigs and the legendary Download festival. “People ask me what growing up around so much music was like, and I don’t know how to answer it,” she laughs of a life soundtracked by the downstairs hum of amps and applause of a crowd. “I’ve never known any different.”
Perhaps the only surprise, then, is that it took so long for Kingston to decide that her lifelong passion could also be her future calling, too, having begun singing lessons at six before conquering her high school’s ‘Battle Of The Bands’ before she could even call herself a teenager. A self-described “artistic, creative person” with a keen eye for makeup design and a love of history, learning and exploring the world around her, the epiphany coincided crucially with a difficult time in her young life. “I struggled for a long time with my identity and who I was,” she says today. “I knew I wasn’t like other kids at my school. I’m a left-of-centre kind of person, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. Lots of them would look at me and think, ‘She’s weird…’ And that led to me being bullied for a while.”
And so music would become not just a welcome fixture, but an important crutch. Thankfully, in the likes of Paramore, YUNGBLUD’s ‘The Underrated Youth’ and Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘Tickets To My Downfall’ albums, Tilly Kingston found not only a sound and a scene that she could for the first time call her own, but people and songs with which she could connect in a deeper way than ever. “I discovered myself in a way I never had before,” Kingston says.
It was around this time that multi-platinum producer Mike Krompass would happen upon Tilly singing onstage one night at the Feathers, and her detractors’ loss would begin to become the world’s gain. Now, with an infectious, effervescent pop-punk bounce, her single ‘Youth Is Wasted’ kicks open the doors of Krompass’ new Base Culture Music Group label (distributed by Sony Orchard), while introducing the next future superstar of alternative pop-rock.
