Joost Klein, the disqualified Eurovision rapper who took Dutch gabber to Coachella

Joost Klein

Photo: VDanDesign / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 10, 1997 Leeuwarden
Occupation	Record Producer
Awards	1LIVE Krone — Best Song · Popprijs · 3FM Award — Best Artist · Zapp Award — Favourite Track NL

On the night of the Eurovision Song Contest final, the Netherlands kept its place in the running order and had nobody to put in it. Joost Klein, who had finished second in his semi-final with Europapa, had been removed by the European Broadcasting Union hours earlier over a backstage confrontation with a camerawoman. His entry became the first in the contest’s history to be disqualified once the event was under way. That should have closed Europe’s door on a gabber-loving rapper from Friesland who sings mostly in Dutch. It opened a bigger one.

Today he is in the middle of his first world tour, a 33-city run that has taken him from Buenos Aires to the desert stage of Coachella and ends in Australia. The question his career keeps asking is how far a voice in a small language can travel on an oversized blue suit and a story about grief. “His story cuts straight through the language barrier,” the music journalist Atze de Vrieze of 3voor12 told the Dutch broadcaster NOS as the tour began. Children now turn up to his concerts dressed as him.

Klein grew up in Britsum, a village just outside Leeuwarden, the city where he was born on November 10, 1997. He was the late child of the family, with a brother and sister roughly fifteen years older. He was thirteen when his father died of cancer. Less than a year later his mother died of cardiac arrest, and his siblings raised him from then on. His brother, born in 1983, became his manager and lent his birth year to the title of a 2019 album, 1983. Klein went to the Stedelijk Gymnasium in Leeuwarden and never finished school.

By then he already had an audience. At twelve he had started a YouTube channel called EenhoornJoost, “Unicorn Joost”, filling it with sketches and small documentaries, and after the late-night show RTL Late Night named him a YouTube talent the channel climbed toward 88,000 subscribers by the end of 2015. With the producer Mick Spek he began putting songs online, and in 2016 the video for Bitches became his first to pass a million views on YouTube. His debut, Dakloos, came out the same year. A short spell with the label Top Notch ended with Klein founding his own, Albino Sports. The mixtape Scandinavian Boy and singles such as Ome Robert built a cult following in the Netherlands and Flanders, and in 2018 he published a book of poems, Albino, because his father had written a book and told him to do the same.

The heavier material arrived with Fryslân, the 2022 album named after his home province and produced entirely by Tantu Beats, the collaborator who has shaped his sound ever since. Between samples of Doe Maar and Crazy Frog sat Florida 2009, a song about the death of his parents. He played it for the first time at Pinkpop that summer, after a short instruction to the crowd: “This song is only for my parents, so do listen along.” Wachtmuziek, from the same record, became one of his best-known songs.

Germany came through a side door. In 2023 the Berlin rapper Ski Aggu and Klein built Friesenjung on a sample of Otto Waalkes, the East Frisian comedian whose own track had turned Sting’s Englishman in New York into a joke about Frisian life. It went to No. 1 in Germany and Austria and won the 1LIVE Krone for best song. At home, Buma Cultuur gave him its Popprijs for his contribution to Dutch pop. Backed by DJs at the radio station 3FM, a petition gathered 25,000 signatures asking for him to be sent to Eurovision, and the broadcaster AVROTROS said yes.

Europapa was written as an ode to open borders and a letter to his father, who had taught him that borders are invented by people. It is retro happy hardcore in the line of 2 Unlimited and Vengaboys, co-written with the gabber pioneer Paul Elstak among others, and it became his first No. 1 on both main Dutch singles charts and the most-streamed song of the 2024 contest on Spotify and YouTube.

What happened after his semi-final in Malmö on May 9, 2024, has never been fully settled. The camerawoman said Klein made a threatening movement toward her as she filmed him coming off stage; AVROTROS said she kept filming against agreements made in advance. The EBU kept him out of rehearsals and then out of the final, a decision AVROTROS called “very heavy and disproportionate”. In August the Swedish Prosecution Authority closed the case, saying it could not prove that the act was capable of causing serious fear or that he intended it, while concluding that he had made a movement that hit her camera. Klein later spoke on the Dutch talk show Eva about exhaustion, mental pressure and death threats. His 2025 album Unity, with guests including Spinvis, Scooter and Tommy Cash, carried lines aimed at Eurovision’s organizers, and when AVROTROS offered him the 2025 slot, he said no, although he had already written a song for it.

The speed of everything since has a cost, and critics have named it. Kleinkunst, released on New Year’s Day 2026 with 24 tracks and guests running from Anouk to Mark Forster and the DJ HorsegiirL, reached No. 4 on Spotify’s global chart of new albums. NRC, de Volkskrant and De Morgen all faulted its length, and the last two gave it three stars out of five, blaming a lack of selection. Klein releases constantly and edits little, and the cartoon persona makes it easy to miss that his strongest songs are about loss.

The response after Malmö was more music, and fast. Luchtballon, released within a month, borrowed the melody of Richard Marx’s Right Here Waiting for a line about a past that hurts and the lessons taken from it. Trafik!, recorded with the Finnish 2023 runner-up Käärijä, followed that summer. In early 2025 the Europapa Tour crossed Europe and North America, and the New York and Los Angeles shows, booked before Eurovision, sold out as soon as they went on sale.

In 2026 he played a single Dutch arena date, at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome in February, before opening the world tour in Buenos Aires on March 27. In April he played the Gobi stage at Coachella, billed by his tour as the first Dutch-language act on the festival, and brought out Käärijä for Trafik!. Shortly before Eurovision returned in Vienna, he, Käärijä and Tommy Cash released Boyband, a three-song EP whose lead single, I Miss Us, sends its proceeds to Musicians Without Borders. Dutch Hardcore, ten tracks in twenty minutes, followed on July 30. Flemish television viewers know him from a coach’s chair as well: he is a coach on the tenth season of The Voice van Vlaanderen, alongside Koen Wauters and Laura Tesoro.

He gives few interviews to the Dutch press and plays less at home than abroad; in 2025 his only Dutch festival shows were Pinkpop and Paaspop. The world tour has its final stretch ahead of it, with Auckland on November 29, Melbourne on December 2 and a closing show in Perth on December 8. The Eurovision stage he was removed from has turned out not to be the one he needed.

Selected Discography

Dakloos (2016)
Scandinavian Boy (2017)
M van marketing (2018)
Albino (2019)
1983 (2019)
Joost Klein 7 (2020)
Albino Sports, Vol. 1 (2021)
Fryslân (2022)
Unity (2025)
Kleinkunst (2026)

Tags: singers, hip hop, rappers, Joost Klein, Ski Aggu, Friesenjung

Related People

Selected Discography

Related People

Discussion