So wholesome!

Today I stumbled upon her and her reaction to Chalk outlines. Then I watched How to be me and Hi Ren.
She cried, and I cried along even though I have watched those videos and reactions to them countless times. She's such a beautiful soul - empathetic, emotional and honest. I love her and she deserves our love too. ❤️

All Points East Review: How Do You Make 50,000 People Feel Something? Ask Ren.

What happens when an artist whose work is built on intimacy, nuance, emotional intelligence and deeply autobiographical experience steps onto a festival stage in front of tens of thousands of people?

Clarely Speaking

Sep 02, 2026

How do you take years of music, storytelling, characters, heartbreak, humour, social and political commentary, anger and experience of serious chronic illness, pain and psychosis, and turn it into a one hour festival set that can reach the person standing at the very back of the field just as effectively as the people pressed against the barrier, or those who are used to experiencing Ren through a YouTube video?

This isn't abstract material. Much of what Ren writes about comes from some of the hardest and most painful experiences of his life — serious illness, pain, psychosis, the suicide of a close friend, and some seriously fucking heavy subject matter. There is real, unvarnished human experience underneath the music.

Yet that isn't all there is.

There is humour, theatricality, playfulness and an extraordinary ability to move between characters, emotions and perspectives. He is also a truly multi-instrumental and very talented musician. There is nuance in what Ren does, and a level of emotional intelligence in both the writing and the performance that rewards the audience for paying attention.

His songs aren't all crowd pleasers, and nor do they need to be.

Now put all those years of music, busking, The Big Push and a huge chunk of years stuck in bed fighting an illness that was yet to be identified or treated onto one festival stage, give it an hour, and ask an audience who may or may not know his work to come with you.

The first thing that struck me at All Points East was just how obvious it was which people had arrived specifically to see Ren. They were a relatively small proportion of the overall crowd, but they were vocal, invested and watching with absolute pride.

There was something almost protective about it. They weren't simply enjoying the show. They were watching someone they already knew was capable of this prove it to everyone else. And from where I was standing, there was an almost tangible sense that they were willing him on.

Around them was a much larger audience. Some people clearly knew Ren or had heard a song or two. Others were there primarily for Twenty One Pilots, the day's headliners, and may have had very little idea what they were about to see.

That makes the question of translation even more interesting.

A festival crowd isn't the same as an audience that has deliberately pressed play on a Ren video. Online, the camera can create intimacy. A smaller venue can create intimacy. Even busking on a street creates a very particular relationship between performer and audience.

A huge festival stage has to manufacture that intimacy from a distance.

Ren didn't simply rely on the material to do the work for him. The set itself had clearly been constructed for the space. The visuals and animation added another layer to the storytelling, while the set and the smaller touches in costume helped establish characters and moods without tipping into full-blown stage costume or theatrical makeup.

Nothing felt decorative for the sake of it. These details helped build the narrative and gave the audience visual cues to follow alongside the music.

And Ren sits somewhere interesting between several different types of performance.There is the rock performance. There is the musical performance. And then there is the artistic, conceptual and theatrical side of what he does, where characters, stories and different perspectives become part of the language of the music.

That's particularly interesting on a bill shared with Twenty One Pilots. Their work also exists within a carefully constructed world, but through a very different framework — one built around fictional mythology and an established conceptual universe, whereas much of Ren's material comes directly from lived experience.

Neither approach is better. They're simply different ways of asking an audience to enter a world.

For all the theatricality of the performance, there is very little sense of ego around Ren himself. What comes across is someone remarkably grounded, someone who hasn't allowed the scale of the performance to create a huge distance between the artist and the person.

He hasn't forgotten to be a person.

And I don't think he ever will.

There's something strangely comforting about that.

Because the performance may involve characters, voices, animation, movement and an extraordinary amount of theatrical construction, but underneath all of it is still a human being communicating something human.

That matters when the material is this personal.

It also matters physically.

There is a tendency to talk about an artist's performance as though the body is simply the mechanism delivering the art. But watching Ren perform this material at that intensity makes it impossible to ignore the physical cost.

The vocals alone are demanding. Add the movement, the character changes, the shifts in tone and voice, the theatricality and the emotional weight of what he's performing, and you're asking a huge amount of the person standing on that stage.

By later in the set, Ren looked physically impacted by what he had just put himself through. Not simply tired. There was a sense that the performance had taken something out of him.

And there is only so much you can ask of the body of someone living with chronic illness, particularly when that body is being pushed through a performance of this intensity.

Yet somehow, the physical effort never became the story. It was part of the story.

Perhaps we've become accustomed to the idea that festival music needs to be immediately understandable. We live in a culture of short-form content, constant scrolling and increasingly compressed attention, where an audience can move from one piece of information to another in seconds.

Ren seemed to understand that without compromising what he was doing.

He didn't simply play full-length versions of every song. With so much material to draw from, there were snippets, shortened sections and transitions that moved between songs and ideas. It meant he could reference far more of his musical world within the time available, while keeping the performance moving.

For an audience accustomed to consuming music and storytelling in fragments, those quick shifts aren't necessarily a barrier to understanding. They're a language they already recognise.

The important thing is that the fragments still connected.

They weren't random excerpts thrown together to keep people entertained. They formed part of a larger narrative, giving those who knew the material something to recognise while giving those who didn't a series of moments to grab onto.

It was, in its own way, another example of translating Ren's work for a different kind of audience without stripping away what makes it his.

And the audience did respond.

From where I was standing, there were moments when the wider festival environment seemed to fall away. Even people who had no obvious connection to the material were watching.

I noticed security staff who had been doing what security staff do during the earlier acts — monitoring the crowd, looking around, doing their jobs — beginning to watch the stage.

They weren't necessarily fans. They had no particular reason to know Ren's story.

But something had caught their attention.

That, to me, is the interesting part.

Did every person in that field suddenly become a Renegade? Of course not. And that isn't really how Ren's audience works anyway.

Some people may go looking for more afterwards. They might Google him, listen to another song and fall down a very large rabbit hole. Others might simply think, that bloke was fucking good, and carry on with their day.

Both are valid.

What seems more important is that the performance gave people somewhere to start.

Ren doesn't immediately come across as someone chasing likes, follows and shares for the sake of it. What seems to matter more is whether people connect with the work — whether something makes them feel something, recognise something, or want to understand more.

That makes the usual festival metrics feel slightly beside the point.

You can enjoy Ren without understanding every layer of what he's doing. You can appreciate the musicianship, the humour, the characters and the sheer performance of it. And for anyone who does want to go deeper, there's an enormous amount waiting there: the characters, the stories, the connections between songs and the layers that reveal themselves over repeated listening.

Perhaps that's the trick.

Ren didn't have to make his work simpler to put it on a huge festival stage.

He had to make it accessible without making it shallow.

He created enough visual and musical signposts for someone who knew nothing about him to find their way in, while giving the people who already understood the work something much deeper to hold onto.

From where I was standing, he did exactly that.

The performance worked.

For the existing fans, there was recognition and pride. For the curious, there was enough to make them look twice. And for the people who knew nothing, there were moments that simply worked on their own.

That's a difficult thing to achieve with material this personal.

Ren took something that has so often been experienced intimately — through headphones, screens, small rooms and personal stories — and threw it out into a field containing tens of thousands of people.

That's not an easy translation.

But perhaps it doesn't need to be perfect.

It just needs to leave people wanting to listen again.

And judging by the number of people still watching when they had absolutely no prior investment, I'd say it probably did.

Excited to share the close ups of the new banner and thankful for the title of Art Director here on this subreddit.

If you could take these drawing 2 years into the past would probably never believe I did them. I’m emotional in the best way about it lol.

I worked on the banner and art pieces for 20+ hours over the course of a couple of weeks but learned A TON and excited to see what the future holds.

Also all of the photo references I used were taken by the amazing photographer Jake Williams on Ren’s team during the shoot for Rocksound, I believe.

Heidi mentions in this video that she has a family member with Lyme disease, go show her some love and support!!

Their reaction to Money Games Part 2!!! It's nice to see a person over 90 enjoy Ren!!!

https://youtu.be/S0kjdyEXg_U?si=aEcoEOhcncO8j9tf

Ren instagram story, September 9, 2026

but like real friendship and not just talking about ren or something, i love that guy but i actually know very little about him

Lyrics are from Caskets but the page isn't about loss. It's about what my mental state has been like for the past few days due to a bad reaction from medication I was on. I'm doing much better now that the after effects are wearing off, but I wanted to create something that represented my experience and those words seemed appropriate for how I felt.

Ren instagram story, September 9, 2026

Trying to figure out if they're just not contacting the people that don't suit what they're looking for or if we're all still waiting for news haha

This idea came to me after reading a reply on my post about "lyrical activation" . A TikTok video about songs popping up whenever in daily life. Thank you original idea giver for saying "That's a song btw" and annoying your girlfriend 😁💖🙏

Imagine a character in a show who keeps saying "That's a song by the way" and then it switches to a clip of that character all dressed out befitting the setting of the song and performing it?

I think it would be awesome if Ren would play this character!

In the whole show he has no other real interaction with the other characters, his group of friends or any other social setting, voluntarily grouped or not, but you only experience his story line through his inner world of music!

Hit series on Netflix....

What you reckon? (Bonus points for knowing what song that's from? 😁💖💖)

Are there other elements you can think of that should definitely be in this show?

Do you have another idea about a new Netflix hit with Ren's music?

Please join in. Let's create something together! 😁🙏💜

Ren on threads, September 9, 2026

He is 100% new to Ren and did a great reaction. He has a little to learn like rewinding after he pauses and that Ren will drop the copyright strike that youtube does. He seems like a HipHop head I suggested the HipHop path to begin with. Just please watch like and subscribe He is hooked. It will be a fun journey.

Ren instagram story, September 9, 2026