The morning of our interview, Yung Kai had woken up earlier than usual—8 a.m., which he says isn’t the norm for him. There’s a message from his publicist waiting on his phone. “Yo, you’re nominated for Juno.” It takes a second to sink in. “I straight-up just called some friends and woke them up,” he says, jokingly adding, “They got mad at me. But it’s okay. I’m happy, so that’s all that matters.”
The 2026 nomination—for Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the Juno Awards, Canada’s closest equivalent to the Grammys—comes just months after the 2025 release of his debut album, stay with the ocean, i’ll find you, which anchored his first world tour. The tour itself followed the runaway success of his mega-viral 2024 hit “blue,” which has since amassed more than one billion streams across platforms. Suffice to say, it’s been an eventful three years for the 23-year-old singer-songwriter.
Music, though, had perhaps always been in the cards for Yung Kai, who was born Max Zhang in Vancouver and raised in Shanghai before returning to Canada for university. Interested in music from a young age, he learned piano and drums before landing on guitar. “That was kind of how I really learned how to make music,” he says. “It’s been the dream for me ever since the eighth grade.”
In his early twenties, Kai started making songs alone in his bedroom, teaching himself how to produce by trial and instinct. He’d begin with the instrumental—building a mood first—then move to melodies and lyrics. “I always start with making the instrumental,” he says. “That’s my favorite part, because there are endless possibilities. I feel very free when I’m just working by myself in my room.”
I always start with making the instrumental
That same bedroom process led, almost accidentally, to the song that changed everything: “blue.” Released in August 2024 with no major marketing push, the song didn’t just catch on—it went viral at a scale few debut singles ever do. “It took me a really long time to realize what was happening,” he admits. “But in the first month after it dropped, there was just an insane amount of DMs and emails. I was answering everything myself. It was overwhelming, but a really interesting experience.”
That momentum carried directly into his debut album, stay with the ocean, i’ll find you, released in September 2025. The record expanded on the emotional world of “blue,” but now Kai had to learn how to carry those songs beyond his bedroom. Released alongside his first proper world tour, the Flower Moon and Star Tour took him across Asia—Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei—before returning to intimate, sold-out dates in North America.
“Before my tour, most of the shows I played were festivals, so people would know the song ‘blue,’ maybe some ‘wildflower,’” he says, recalling a show in Singapore. “But at my own concert, everyone knew all the lyrics to all my songs, which honestly was so crazy to me. That was the first time that happened.”
The tour also marked how far his music had traveled. One of the more visible moments was a remix of “blue” featuring Minnie of (G)I-DLE. “I told my team how much I liked her and they were just like, ‘Okay, let’s make it happen,’” he said earnestly. “So we went to Korea and recorded our parts together, listened it back, mixed it a little in the studio. It was just good vibes meeting each other and talking about life.”
By the time the tour wrapped, there wasn’t much room to pause. It felt like Kai had only a few months to rest. By the time this story comes out, he’s back on the road for a significantly larger North American tour—18 cities, 20 dates across the U.S. and Canada—his biggest run yet. This time, the shows will mix songs fans already know with unreleased material, a chance to test new ideas live and feel out where his sound wants to go next.
After a year of collaboration, touring, and rapid exposure, Kai has felt himself pulling inward again. “I worked with a lot of crazy talented writers and producers,” he says of the past year. “But I really want to work on just myself in my own bedroom like I did in the past, you know? That’s how I made ‘blue’ and ‘do you think you could love me?’”
That confidence—trusting his own intuition above all—adds some context to the Juno nomination. Years ago, while taking a university songwriting class, Kai was first introduced to the awards by a professor. “Maybe I’ll see one of you guys up there one day,” the teacher said. Kai remembers exactly what he thought in that moment: “Yeah, that’s going to be me.” And now it is.
