Way Dynamic has won over the world. Just don’t call him ‘Elton John’s favourite artist’

When the world began to take notice of Way Dynamic, the only people not surprised were the ones who’d already been paying close attention.

Over the past decade, Dylan Young, the artist behind the project, has earned a reputation as a musician’s musician. If you were to run a conspiracist’s red string between the names of a dozen or more artists from Melbourne’s jangle scene pinned to a board on the wall, Young and his collaborators intersect an endless number of them.

“For quite a long time, people wanted him in their bands because he’s an amazing player,” says Stefan Blair from the duo Good Morning. Blair has produced and engineered all three Way Dynamic albums, beginning with 2022’s So Familiar, and can often be found behind the drums when they perform live.

“That was the reputation for such a long time: put him in a band and he will elevate it, purely through his playing. He’s a good person to have on stage. He will make your band better. And he’s just worked away and done that for many years,” Blair says.

With Way Dynamic’s 2025 release Massive Shoe, though, something shifted. The scope expanded. The recognition came not just for his artful, sentimental playing but for his songwriting and tender vocals. And it flowed in from listeners, from the industry at large, and from high-profile celebrity co-signs including artists Young admires like Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, MJ Lenderman, and Nate Amos of This Is Lorelei.

Now signed to the international record label Jagjaguwar, Way Dynamic has re-released the album, coinciding with tour dates across North America, the UK and Europe (as well as a short stint at home).

Witnessing the attention on the project this past year has felt almost novel, a relic from the distant past. It’s a music industry success story that’s occurred while everyone was looking the other way, obsessing over streaming numbers, viral campaigns, on-stage celebrity cameos and controversial clip-farming strategies. In the midst of it all, a working musician from Melbourne has broken through on the strength of imaginative songwriting and sun-drenched arrangements. What a rare thrill.

I’m meeting 30-year-old Young in the crunchy organic cafe inside CERES, the community farm in Brunswick, days before he heads off to tour the UK, where he’ll play at Green Man and End of the Road festivals alongside a string of headline dates. He’s wearing a camo hat and a T-shirt from Snowy Band, the Melbourne indie band he plays in. It’s led by Liam Halliwell who also tours live with Way Dynamic and played on his record. “We certainly are an incestuous bunch,” he laughs, describing the interconnected networks of artists in his orbit.

‘I would probably be embarrassed to see a headline like: Elton John’s favourite artist …’

Dylan Young

Young grew up in Ballarat before moving to Melbourne to study, lured by the lore of vanguards in the 2010s indie scene like Dick Diver, Twerps and Scott and Charlene’s Wedding. New to the city, it took him a while to “find [his] people”.

He and Blair first met after a gig, where they locked into a long conversation about Carole King. Since the beginning of Way Dynamic, Blair says, “Dylan definitely [drew] from that school of Brill Building songwriting. She’s still an inspiration for many of the things that we’ve made together.”

When they stepped into the studio to track Massive Shoe, Young was coming off a break-up and felt his guards had been brought down, which allowed him to be more reflective and do away with any vagueness that might have infiltrated in the past. “I was happy being vulnerable – more vulnerable than I had been,” he says.

He also surrendered his impulse to be, for lack of a better word, a control freak. When Halliwell showed up one day with a double bass – “unprompted,” Young clarifies – he succumbed to the spontaneity. The instrument featured on Miffed It, a standout track on a record full of them – one Crutchfield declared her “favourite song in a very long time”.

Another day, Young’s brother, a journalist, popped into the studio to visit and ended up being handed a triangle to ding on album closer Evening Star. “I could tell that the playing slightly irked Dylan, and he kept talking about needing to get rid of it,” Blair remembers. “I was like, ‘Lean into it. I think it’s charming and it’s nice that your brother’s on this track now’. It took a bit of work for him personally, I’m sure.”

“I’d have pretty strong ideas and I had the opinion that I was the only one that could play them – or, at least, it was quicker and easier,” Young says of his despotic instincts. “But I think that leaves you in danger of the recordings feeling a little contrived.” Massive Shoe is anything but.

After its original release, headlines were written about the celebrities who’d announced themselves as Way Dynamic fans. Zane Lowe sang his praises in interviews and cast members from Stranger Things told red carpet interviewers they’d shared Miffed It in their group chat. Elton John raved about Ibiza on his Apple Music show, and John Mayer programmed People Settle Down on his. Despite being the darling of tastemakers and musicians-turned-radio-DJs, Young puts their praise in perspective.

“I would probably be embarrassed to see a headline like, ‘Elton John’s favourite artist’ or something,” he says – namely because underneath it is a core truth he bristles at. “It’s bringing to light one of the problems with the Australian music industry … that it only pays attention to acts from here, more or less, once they’ve garnered recognition from overseas. I think that sort of undercuts the Australian ability to discern if something’s good [if we decide] it’s [good] just because Elton John says it is.”

There’s an addictive vein of absurdism that shows up in Young’s songwriting, a comedic bent delivered with absolute sincerity that only reveals itself on close inspection. The record’s title comes from a line in the track In Review where Young envisions a romantic dream-life, one where he’s the promoter of a stand-up comic or the devoted partner feeding lines to an actor. “I see us flying to space in a massive shoe/And I’m still the one who wakes up next to you”, he sings. It’s the double-hander of silliness and unvarnished honesty that makes his music so impossible to deny.

When his band performed at Golden Plains in March, the festival crowd witnessed not just the guitars, bass, drums, violin and cowbell, but a frying pan and bottle of tomato sauce, too. In the back corner of the stage, over a portable cooktop, his friend prepared potato gems and veggie sausages for the band’s breakfast.

“I’m always internally pontificating on the importance of comedy, especially if something can be subversive with the form,” Young says, name-checking Nathan Fielder, Connor O’Malley and Sam Campbell as north stars for striking this specific tone. He believes the dumbest jokes delivered with just the right amount of straight-faced earnestness can be the smartest.

“And the joke is, ‘Can you believe I just said something that dumb?’ I think I’m ever-searching for how to strike the balance between absurd and sincere, or stupid and poignant.”

With the international re-release of Massive Shoe coinciding with more touring and attention, Young is keeping his head down and focusing on what he knows is real and tangible. “I think I am fortunate enough to have been doing this long enough to know, for a small act or a big act, it does really just hinge on making good stuff,” he says.

“You need a lot of luck to get success in the music industry. But before that, the baseline needs to be that you make good things and that you work hard. And then luck is the thing on top of that. So I do tend to think that for anyone, not just myself, just make good things and good things will come.”

It’s almost as if, when he sat down to write Success and took it to the studio with his closest collaborators, he was predicting exactly the words he’d need to hear years later as it took hold around the world: “Just do your thing, and everybody will adore it.”

Way Dynamic’s Massive Shoe is out now. They will perform at Bellingen Golf Club in Bellingen (NSW) on November 4, The Eltham Hotel in Eltham (NSW) on November 5, Mapleton Pub in Mapleton (QLD) on November 6, Brisbane’s Season Three on November 7, Elm House in Mount Glorious (QLD) on November 8, and the Town Folk Festival in Castlemaine (VIC) on November 21.

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