Tricky Youth is a Los Angeles based artist who grew up in New York City’s underground DIY punk and noise scenes, where he began writing and performing his own music, spoken word, and performance art pieces. He eventually expanded his work across the United States to various shows and festivals alongside noise artists such as Wolf Eyes, Justice Yeldham, and Pharmakon.

From 2019 to 2022 he recorded and self-released a stream of alternative hip-hop material, compiled on the 2023 release Scratched Until the Light Came In. During these years, he steadily built both a following and a deep connection to and friendships in DIY communities across the country, reflecting the ethos and principles of the underground scenes which he grew up in. Those ethos and principles would become a core tenet of both his artistic work and broader grassroots political activism.

With his Spring 2022 release Decay Into Bloom: Hymns for Winter and Spring, Tricky Youth moved in a more guitar-oriented, industrial metal direction. His first US tour in Summer 2022 featured performances with artists such as Danish punk band Iceage at the Insane Clown Posse’s legendary Gathering of the Juggalos festival. In Fall 2022 he released his first full-length album, the nümetal-inflected, The Further Down We Go, the Less I Recognize, co-produced with SoDrove. The album was released on KFC Murder Chicks’ PSNEAKY imprint.

Tricky Youth spent the following two years touring with artists affiliated with the PSneaky roster including DJ Rozwell, Whit3corset, burnt-feathers, Embrasa, and Faradayribcage. These performances were marked by acts of intense physicality like ritual bloodletting and being tattooed onstage in addition to presenting a multimedia experience that featured live painting and VHS tapes played on CRT TVs. Through consistent touring, he continued to set roots down across the American musical DIY underground, building up a reputation as a singular and propulsive artistic voice and live performer, as well as a champion of scenes and musicians that operated under staunchly anti-capitalist, pro-community principles. During this time, he also released a series of singles that ranged from rock n’ roll ragers like It’s Gonna Hurt No Matter What and Revelations, Baby! to long-form noise pieces like Eternal Degradation and Sorry to Serpent Effigy, a darkwave-tinged nod to his alternative rap past.

After the completion of his in Search of the Divine US tour in late 2024, Tricky Youth began recording his second full-length album, A Hum in the Distance Growing Louder Each Day. Across the sprawling record, he sonically ties together ten years of artistic explorations with heavy guitars, blown-out beats, experimental noise passages, spoken word interludes, and oscillations between industrial-grade heaviness and more delicate, introspective moments. The album touches on many of the themes that have ran through his work throughout the years; political sentiments/statements against fascism, imperialism, and the police state, the grotesque nature of media worship, addiction, grief, a rejection of puritanical belief systems, ruminations on the relationship between human beings and the divine, and the desperate desire within humans to not just make contact with the divine, but to overtake and in the end become God, and the madness which that pursuit leads to, on both a personal and societal level.

In advance of the release of his new album, he set out on another US tour in the Summer of 2025, alongside artists such as KFC Murder Chicks and Domesticatrix.