Ski Aggu, the Berlin rapper in ski goggles whose retirement lasted four months

Ski Aggu

Photo: Schwabenmodel / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 3, 1997 Wilmersdorf
Occupation	Rapper
Awards	1Live Krone — Best Song, Friesenjung · 1Live Krone — Best Hip-Hop/R&B Song, Anders · 1Live Krone — Best Newcomer · 1Live Krone — Best Artist · 1Live Krone — Best Alternative Song, Wie du manchmal fehlst · 1Live Krone — Best Hip-Hop Song, Palermo · Hiphop.de Award — Best National Solo Rap Act

When Ski Aggu says goodbye, the joke is part of the message. Shortly before Christmas he told his followers that it was time to listen to his body and put the microphone down for an indefinite period, because he was off to do work and travel in Australia, find himself and finally learn some English. In the comments he added that an apprenticeship at the savings bank in Schmargendorf would come next. Four months later he was back, barefoot and long-haired on breakfast television. Six months after that his new album went straight to No. 1 in Germany, and on it he raps that Australia was only a joke and that he never needed a break. In the same song he describes a nasty burnout that winter. The ski goggles stay on, and the question of who is wearing them stays open.

Behind the goggles is August Jean Diederich, who grew up in Wilmersdorf, a leafy, comfortable district of what used to be West Berlin. His grandfather is the political scientist Nils Diederich. He played football for FC Internationale Berlin, enrolled at the Technical University of Berlin and, by his own account, dropped out after releasing his first song. He has also said that he spent a spell in Ireland, trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu there and won the Irish title in his weight class, a claim that comes from him alone. He was born in Berlin on 3 November 1997.

The first recordings went up on SoundCloud from 2018. They were already about going out, but they sounded darker and sadder than what came later, and his childhood friend Ritter Lean turned up on many of them. The first official single, Weißwein & Pappbecher (“white wine and paper cups”), arrived in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, when the parties he described were mostly impossible to attend. Super Wavy, made with YFG Pave, remained his most streamed track for two years.

The break came in October 2022 with Party Sahne, recorded with the producers Endzone and Ericson. It borrows its melody from Jerk It Out by the Swedish band Caesars and peaked at No. 32 in Germany, modest numbers for the song that changed the size of his rooms. That winter he took his first tour, Aprés Ski, around the German-speaking cities. His debut album, 2022 war Film gewesen, followed on 2 December 2022. Yannik Gölz of laut.de gave it four stars out of five, writing that Aggu had an ear for mood and knew he did not need to spell out how his music works.

From then on his records came out through jungeratze, his label run in partnership with Universal, and from 2023 through his own company, Ski Aggu GmbH. On 25 May 2023 he released Friesenjung with the Dutch rapper Joost Klein and the comedian Otto Waalkes, a new version of Waalkes’s own parody of Sting’s Englishman in New York. It went to No. 1 in Germany and Austria, the first chart-topping single for all three of them. His second album, Denk mal drüber nach…, also reached No. 1 in Germany and went gold, and in late October 2023 Liebe Grüße, with RAF Camora, gave him another No. 1 single in Germany and Austria. That December the radio station 1Live gave him three of its Krone awards in one night, best song for Friesenjung, best hip hop song for Anders and best newcomer; nobody had won three before. A year later the same awards named him best artist.

The obvious objection to Ski Aggu is that much of it has been heard before, sometimes literally. His two most famous songs lean on melodies other people wrote, and his own self-assessment is blunt: he once told Der Tagesspiegel that he cannot sing, so he tries to stand out with punchlines. Johann Voigt of Die Zeit described him as the representative of a post-pandemic hedonism and his style as a pattern of indifference and catchiness. The persona invites suspicion as well. His autumn 2023 tour was billed as an election campaign with a run for chancellor as its stated goal, and the Tagesspiegel noted that he claimed to be 18 while rapping about his time at university. The retirement fits the same pattern. Nobody outside his circle knows how much of it was rest and how much was marketing. That ambiguity is the act, and it is also what keeps people listening for the moments when the costume slips.

Those moments do exist. In May 2024 he released Wie du manchmal fehlst with Zartmann, a quiet song about longing and loss that went gold in Germany and Austria. His third album, Wilmersdorfs Kind, named after the district he never stopped rapping about, came out on 30 August 2024 with guest spots from Makko, Jeremias, Ikkimel and Ritter Lean, and topped the charts in Germany and Austria. Two weeks later he stood next to Stefan Raab and Sido on RTL for Raab’s comeback show, performing the new song Pa aufs Maul. In 2025 he took his first world tour through Europe and North America, with club dates in cities such as Dublin and Copenhagen.

The comeback started in April 2026 with the single Geld, which swapped the Eurodance of his earlier hits for the heavy drops of dubstep, and with a strange appearance on SAT.1’s breakfast show, where he arrived barefoot in a boho outfit and talked about wanting to experience life as consciously as possible. He then played twelve summer festivals, the Modular Festival among them. Ski Aggu Musik, his fourth album, was released on 16 October 2026 through jungeratze and Universal: fourteen tracks in about 27 minutes that mix rap with techno, Eurodance, hardtekk, dubstep and jumpstyle. Ericson, who was also on Party Sahne, returns on the melancholy club track Verschwommen, and Spring features Mr. Polska and Natte Visstick. The two most revealing songs are the slower ones. In 384 Tage he admits that he would like to be more private but the camera flash keeps him hooked, and in Wer ist Aggu? he plays both sides of the retirement story at once. On 23 October 2026 GfK Entertainment confirmed the album at No. 1 in Germany, his third chart-topping album in a row.

He has skipped a full tour this year in favour of two album shows, at the Muffathalle in Munich on 23 October and at the Columbiahalle in Berlin on 26 October. The next test is the Insider Tour, ten concerts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and he wants phones banned in the room. It opens on 5 February 2027 at the Moya Kulturbühne in Rostock, where the people who know him mainly from short phone videos will have to watch him with their own eyes.