Tilly Kingston proudly proclaims that Youth Is Wasted on the young in her new single and video — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
With her hard-edged, metal-infused pop-punk, Kingston wants to connect with anyone who’s ever felt like a misfit. “Youth Is Wasted is a tongue-in-cheek ‘Piss off!’ to all the people who look down on me and say I am wasting my life and having too much fun,” she says. “Well if this is wasting my life than fuck yeah, I am, and loving every minute of it!!”
A refreshing, unorthodox counter to the typical pop artist, Kingston was born for the stage. Having grown up living above a music venue in the unassuming city of Lichfield, 15 miles north of the rock ’n’ roll epicentre of Birmingham, it’s little surprise that the charismatic year old cannot remember a time when music was not the dominant fixture in her life. “People ask me what growing up around so much music was like, and I don’t know how to answer it,” she laughs of a life soundtracked by the downstairs hum of amps and applause of a crowd. “I’ve never known any different.”
Perhaps the only surprise, then, is that it took so long for Kingston to decide that her lifelong passion could also be her future calling, too, having begun singing lessons at six before conquering her high school’s battle of the bands before she was a teenager. A self-described “artistic, creative person” with a keen eye for makeup design and a love of history, learning and exploring the world around her, the epiphany coincided crucially with a difficult time in her young life. “I struggled for a long time with my identity and who I was,” she says today. “I knew I wasn’t like other kids at my school. I’m a left-of-centre kind of person, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. Lots of them would look at me and think, ‘She’s weird…’ ”
Thankfully, in the likes of Yungblud’s The Underrated Youth and Machine Gun Kelly’s Tickets To My Downfall albums, Kingston found not only a sound and a scene that she could for the first time call her own, but people and songs with which she could connect in a deeper way than ever. “I discovered myself in a way I never had before,” Kingston says.
It was around this time that multi-platinum producer Mike Krompass would happen upon Tilly singing onstage one night — in the venue downstairs, naturally — and her detractors’ loss would begin to become the world’s gain. Now, with an infectious, effervescent pop-punk bounce, her single Youth Is Wasted kicks open the doors, introducing the next future superstar of alternative pop-rock.
Watch the video for Youth Is Wasted above, check out the track below, and waste some quality time with Tilly Kingston on her website, Instagram and TikTok.
