RUSSELL! Grew Up Online. Now He’s Making Some of the Best Music of His Career. [Exclusive]

Before he was RUSSELL!, he was D-Pryde, a young kid from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, who discovered posting videos on YouTube years before the rest of the world. And unlike the record industry, it didn’t take him long to realize this new platform he was using to post silly remixes to popular songs could be something bigger: a stage.

RUSSELL! uploaded his first YouTube videos around 20 years ago, when he was barely a teenager. Those first uploads were parodies and remixes of popular Soulja Boy songs, making them the most “late 2000s” internet thing possible. Still, he was watching people like Smosh, Ryan Higa, and Tim Chantarangsu make videos from their bedrooms and build real audiences online. He was paying attention… close attention.

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“The root of it was Timothy DeLaGhetto, Soulja Boy, and Smosh,” RUSSELL! said during his exclusive conversation with VICE. “It only tells you what kind of times we were in.”

Photo Credit: Ry Ones

During those early days, RUSSELL! says he was motivated only by passion, which was pivotal to his overall growth as an artist. It’s important to remember that there wasn’t a huge creator economy yet. There was no blueprint or strategy you could mimic to ensure you went viral and blew up overnight. You simply made something, posted it online, and hoped an audience would eventually find it.

And because brand partnerships and massive YouTube checks weren’t really a thing yet, that wasn’t what RUSSELL! was after. He wanted something bigger: a career.

“It was really for the love of the game and the popularity in the beginning stages,” he said. “There weren’t really any reference points for monetization of YouTube,” he continued. “I just kind of went the music route, and I wanted to see if I could get a record deal. Because record deals were huge back then. A major record deal was a big thing.”

“Fast money isn’t always good money,” he continued. “I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist.”

This brings us to Flowers, RUSSELL’s latest project, released back in March of this year.

In our conversation, I told him the album felt like “a 10,000 hours kind of project.” I describe it that way because the album isn’t anything like a reinvention or a return to form. Instead, it feels like a culmination of a long career that started on YouTube but has now taken him all over the world, as RUSSELL! has toured with some of the biggest artists in the genre, including J. Cole.

The album is extremely polished and highlights everything RUSSELL!, now 32, has done over the past two decades. There’s a little bit of rapping, a lot of singing, and it’s all mixed together to showcase everything he’s been about since he first showed up on your computer screen all those years ago. And if you’ve been there since day one, when sillyness was what first drew you in, there’s even some of that in RUSSELL’s game today, as he recently used that skill to help him promote an upcoming show at The Drake Underground in Toronto, on May 7.

“I don’t care if you call me a rapper,” he said. “I don’t care if you call me a singer, as long as I’m good to you.”

Photo Credit: Ry Ones

That one quote is probably the cleanest way to understand where RUSSELL! is at now mentally in 2026. He’s not trying to escape his past, but he’s not trying to lean too heavily on it, either. He knows those early YouTube years are part of his story, and that many of those videos are still easy to find online. But if anything, he feels like his past is important context, especially if you’re someone looking to be inspired during what has been a difficult time for many across the world.

To him, being in his early 30s and still making some of his best work is a kind of argument against the unrealistic and unfair timeline of internet ambition. You know, the one where people in their early 20s already feel “washed” because they haven’t become global superstars by the time they can legally rent a car.

“You’re getting this generation of early 20-somethings thinking it’s over,” he said. “So if you have this 32-year-old that’s visibly healthier and more talented and still pumping out his best work year after year, it’s going to let you know, maybe it’s not over.”

For RUSSELL!, it seems Flowers could be the start of an entirely new leg of his career.

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