Kim Dracula is the stage name of Samuel Wellings, a Tasmanian singer and songwriter who built one of Australia's fastest music-industry rises out of a single TikTok cover video, turning a screamo-theatrical take on Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" into a Columbia Records deal, a debut album featuring Korn's Jonathan Davis, a Heavy Music Award, and headline tours across Australia, the United States, and, beginning in 2026, Europe and the United Kingdom.
Kim Dracula was born Samuel Wellings in Hobart, Tasmania, with sources placing the birth date as either November 23 or November 24, 1997. The stage name is a direct homage to "Kimdracula," a Deftones track from the band's 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist. Kim uses they/them pronouns and has cultivated a deliberately gender-ambiguous public identity, with some outlets describing them as non-binary and others simply as androgynous in presentation, while a handful of biographical databases still list "male." Kim has not offered a single definitive public statement resolving the discrepancy, and the ambiguity itself has become part of the artist's broader stagecraft.
Kim was born roughly a year after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the mass shooting that remains Tasmania's defining historical trauma. In their 2023 interview with Revolver, titled "Unmaking a Murderer," Kim connected the pervasive childhood media coverage of that violence to recurring themes of horror, murder-fascination, and compulsion running through their music and persona. That same interview marked the first public disclosure that Kim lives with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which they describe as intertwined with their fixation on true crime and death imagery. It remains Kim's only confirmed, sourced mental-health disclosure and the fullest public account of their inner life to date.
Family background is thinly documented. Celebrity-trivia sources have described Kim's mother as a vocal coach and named a brother, but fan-forum discussion has Kim describing themselves, via Discord, as entirely self-taught as a vocalist, an account that sits uneasily against the vocal-coach claim. In a 2025 interview with The Rockpit, Kim volunteered an unrelated personal detail: an allergy to cats. Across nearly every profile written about them, Kim is characterized as an unusually private artist who has granted very few in-depth interviews relative to their commercial scale.
Before Kim Dracula existed as a solo project, Samuel Wellings fronted Jesterpose, a Hobart-based metal band formed in 2017. The group released the tracks "V.I.P" and "Shaving Silver" that same year, and later put out a "COVID-19" EP alongside the track "Love Laughs at Andy Hardy" in April 2020. Kim also briefly drummed live, though not on any recordings, for the Tasmanian folk-punk act The Dead Maggies. This period reflects a conventional, DIY local-scene apprenticeship in Hobart's small metal and punk circuit, one with no label interest and no national profile, well before any of the online tools that would eventually launch the Kim Dracula project existed for the artist.
Kim began posting to TikTok earlier in 2020 with semi-satirical emo and metal covers layered over unrelated viral clips, including a screaming vocal overlay on a Bella Poarch video that drew tens of millions of views on its own. These early uploads functioned as a testing ground for the theatrical, screamo-inflected vocal style that would define the Kim Dracula sound, but none of them approached the scale of what came next.
In November 2020, Kim posted a theatrical, screamo-inflected cover of Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" to TikTok. The cover was released to streaming platforms on December 11, 2020, and became the true breakout of the project. By the end of 2020 it had accumulated 6 million YouTube views and 13 million Spotify streams and had soundtracked more than 60,000 TikTok clips, making Kim the fourth most-followed Australian TikTok music artist of the year, trailing only Sia, Iggy Azalea, and Mia Rodriguez.
Momentum accelerated through early 2021. "Paparazzi" reached No. 4 on Spotify's Global Viral 50 chart in January 2021, Kim debuted at No. 47 on Billboard's Emerging Artists chart, and the track entered the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart at No. 31. By April 2021, cumulative numbers for the cover reached 13.4 million TikTok views, 33 million YouTube views, and 55 million Spotify streams, and Kim had become the second most-followed Australian TikTok personality overall, trailing only Sia, with roughly 3.2 million followers on the platform. The scale of that rise, achieved almost entirely through a single cover song and no label infrastructure, set up the industry attention that followed within the year.
Kim's sole studio album to date, A Gradual Decline in Morale, was released July 14, 2023, through Kim's own imprint, Order of the Snake. The record is structured into three theatrical "acts", The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige, echoing the language of stage magic and reinforcing a persona built around performance, illusion, and reveal. Across 20 tracks and roughly 48 minutes, the album folds together earlier singles such as "Make Me Famous," "Drown," and "Land of the Sun" alongside new material including "My Confession," "Superhero," "Divine Retribution," "Undercover," "Industry Secrets," "Rosé," "Reunion and Reintegration," "Kitty Kitty," a cover of the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," and the closing track "The End, for Now."
The album's highest-profile moment is "Seventy Thorns," which features a guest verse from Korn frontman Jonathan Davis, a significant co-sign from nu-metal's founding generation for an artist whose entire public career, at that point, was under three years old. The track "Are You?" features Australian musician Kirin J Callinan. In their 2025 interview with The Rockpit, Kim described the album as having amassed over 60 million streams worldwide and characterized their overall sound as "an unapologetic fusion of nu-metal, trap, industrial, jazz, and hyperpop."
After more than two years without new solo material, Kim released the single "In Threes" on October 31, 2025, alongside the announcement of a first-ever Europe and UK headline tour. Reporting around the release noted that Kim had promised a follow-up record by the end of the year, suggesting a sophomore album may arrive in 2026.
Beyond their own catalogue, Kim Dracula has built an unusually wide guest-feature footprint spanning metal, hip-hop, and pop-adjacent electronic scenes. Credits include "The Bard's Last Note" (Ricky Desktop featuring Kim Dracula, 2020), "Vinny Rotten" (SosMula featuring Kim Dracula, 2021), "Червь / Worm" (IC3PEAK featuring Kim Dracula, 2022), "Artificial Anatomy" (Left to Suffer, from the album Feral, 2023), "W H A T" (Tech N9ne featuring HU$H and Kim Dracula, 2023), "Lubricant Like Kerosene" (SeeYouSpaceCowboy..., from Coup De Grâce, 2024), and "Candy Man" (SosMula, from Sleez Religion, 2024).
On July 16, 2025, Kim released "Heretic" with In This Moment on Better Noise Music, extending a relationship that began when Kim supported the band's Godmode Tour in 2024. Several of these SosMula collaborations carry Republic Records and UMG credits on streaming metadata, but that reflects SosMula's own label arrangement rather than any deal of Kim's own; Kim's recorded output as a lead artist remains released through Columbia Records via Order of the Snake.
Kim's most unusual credit sits outside music entirely: they voiced the character "Luther" on Warriors, the concept album by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis released through Atlantic Records on October 18, 2024, performing the track "Luther Interlude." The placement drew coverage from outlets including The New York Times and marked a rare crossover into musical-theater-adjacent recorded work for an artist otherwise rooted in metal and alternative touring circuits.
Kim Dracula's aesthetic is deliberately theatrical and genre-defiant: heavy corpse-paint-adjacent makeup, androgynous styling, and horror-tinged stagecraft that draws consistent comparisons in music press to Marilyn Manson, Ghost, David Bowie, and Billie Eilish. The three-act structure of A Gradual Decline in Morale, borrowing stage-magician terminology for its section titles, reinforces a persona built around performance and reveal rather than straightforward genre signaling.
Musically, that visual theatricality maps onto a sound that self-consciously refuses genre boundaries, moving between screamed nu-metal verses, trap-influenced percussion, industrial textures, jazz-inflected phrasing, and hyperpop production choices within single songs. Kim's official Cameo bio describes "utilizing their 6-octave vocal range and a vast array of voices they are able to summon" to create music that "mirrors the chaotic world around us," and fan vocal-coaching communities cite the same claimed range, sometimes rounded to six-and-a-half octaves, when discussing how to replicate Kim's screamed and cleanly sung passages. Asked whether visual art and music function as one practice, Kim told The Rockpit: "For me, yes, I have always seen it as one and the same. It's all art to me and all I care about is art."
Kim Dracula's recordings are released through Columbia Records, part of Sony Music Entertainment Australia, via Kim's own boutique imprint, Order of the Snake. The Heavy Music Awards' official 2024 winners listing credits Kim under Columbia Records, consistent with press releases and retail and streaming metadata across the catalogue.
Kim has been managed by Kimberly Schon and Macy Gilbert of Grandview Music since February 2024, having previously been managed by Sophia Liddy at Blue Max Music. Live representation runs through Creative Artists Agency (CAA), following an earlier period with X-ray Touring for international dates. The scale of Kim's 2025 and 2026 touring, a full U.S. co-headline run, an Australian homecoming headline tour, and a 27-date first-ever European and UK headline run, reflects a graduation from support and festival slots into genuine headliner status within roughly four years of the TikTok breakout.
Kim's first-ever live show took place in 2023, shortly before the debut album's release. That year also brought Kim's arrival on the U.S. festival circuit, with appearances at Aftershock in Sacramento and Louder Than Life in Louisville, Kentucky, alongside select tour dates opening for Avenged Sevenfold, a significant scale-up in venue size and audience exposure for an artist not yet three years removed from a viral cover video.
In 2024, Kim supported In This Moment's Godmode Tour, a run that led directly to the following year's "Heretic" collaboration. In 2025, Kim joined a full U.S. co-headline tour alongside Ice Nine Kills, Dayseeker, The Funeral Portrait, and Mest. Later that year, the "Horror Down Under" Australian headline tour kicked off in Brisbane on November 21, 2025, with horror-rock veteran Wednesday 13 in support, marking Kim's first headline run in their native country.
Kim's first-ever Europe and UK headline tour runs from January 24 to March 2, 2026, a 27-date run beginning in Lisbon and closing in Glasgow. The first 14 dates, Lisbon through Helsinki, are supported by the dark alt-rock duo VOWWS; from Stockholm on February 13 through the Glasgow finale on March 2, VIOLENT VIRA joins as direct support, marking her first-ever European and UK live dates.
Kim Dracula presents publicly as guarded but philosophically direct about their art. "Most music is uninteresting to me," they told The Rockpit in 2025. "I just make the music and art that interests me, and if it means something to someone else, that's cool too." The 2023 Revolver interview remains the primary window into Kim's inner life, linking their preoccupation with murder, horror, and true crime to growing up in the shadow of the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, and disclosing that they manage obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Kim's musical formation, fronting the DIY Hobart band Jesterpose, briefly drumming for a folk-punk group, then reinventing entirely through TikTok cover videos, points to a largely self-directed, internet-native career arc rather than a traditional label-development path. Idiosyncratic personal details volunteered in interviews, an allergy to cats, naming Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" as a touchstone song, treating visual art and music as inseparable, reinforce a persona that resists conventional celebrity-profile packaging in favor of oblique, art-first answers.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Forms Jesterpose in Hobart; releases "V.I.P" and "Shaving Silver." |
| 2020 | Jesterpose releases "COVID-19" EP and "Love Laughs at Andy Hardy"; Kim begins posting covers to TikTok; "Paparazzi" cover uploaded in November, released to streaming December 11. |
| 2021 | "Paparazzi" hits No. 4 on Spotify's Global Viral 50; Kim debuts at No. 47 on Billboard Emerging Artists; becomes Australia's second most-followed TikTok music personality behind Sia. |
| 2022 | Releases singles "Make Me Famous" and "Drown," later placed on the debut album. |
| 2023 | Releases "Seventy Thorns" featuring Jonathan Davis; debut album A Gradual Decline in Morale released July 14; plays first-ever live show; appears at Aftershock and Louder Than Life; opens select Avenged Sevenfold dates. |
| 2024 | Wins Best International Breakthrough Artist at the Heavy Music Awards; supports In This Moment's Godmode Tour; voices "Luther" on Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis's Warriors album (Atlantic Records, October 18); management moves to Grandview Music. |
| 2025 | Releases "Heretic" with In This Moment (July 16); joins Tech N9ne and HU$H on "W H A T"; co-headlines U.S. tour with Ice Nine Kills, Dayseeker, The Funeral Portrait and Mest; launches "Horror Down Under" Australian headline tour with Wednesday 13 (November 21); releases "In Threes" and announces 2026 Europe/UK tour (October 31). |
| 2026 | First-ever Europe and UK headline tour runs January 24 to March 2, with VOWWS and later VIOLENT VIRA in support. |
Kim Dracula's legal name is Samuel Wellings. The stage name is a direct homage to "Kimdracula," a track by Deftones from the band's 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist.
Kim was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, with sources giving a birth date of either November 23 or November 24, 1997.
A theatrical, screamo-inflected cover of Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," posted to TikTok in November 2020 and released to streaming on December 11, 2020. It reached No. 4 on Spotify's Global Viral 50 chart and No. 31 on Billboard's Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in early 2021.
Kim's recordings are released through Columbia Records, part of Sony Music Entertainment Australia, via Kim's own imprint, Order of the Snake. Republic Records credits that appear on some of Kim's guest features reflect the host artist SosMula's own label deal, not a Kim Dracula signing.
As of early 2026, Kim's only studio album is A Gradual Decline in Morale (2023). Kim has released the standalone single "In Threes" (October 2025) and has indicated a follow-up record may arrive later in 2026.
Kim uses they/them pronouns and presents publicly with a deliberately gender-ambiguous identity.
Guest credits include Jonathan Davis of Korn (on "Seventy Thorns"), In This Moment ("Heretic"), Tech N9ne and HU$H ("W H A T"), SosMula (multiple tracks), IC3PEAK, Left to Suffer, SeeYouSpaceCowboy..., Ricky Desktop, and a voice role on Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis's Warriors album.
As of late 2025, Kim Dracula's Spotify monthly listener count sits around 1.1 to 1.15 million, with Kworb tracking career totals of roughly 387 million cumulative Spotify streams and a daily run-rate near 145,000 streams. That figure is broadly consistent with Kim's own self-reported "over 60 million streams worldwide" figure for the debut album specifically, since that number appears to reference album-attributable streams at an earlier point rather than the full career total across singles and features. Instagram presence sits in a more modest range, previously reported around 239,800 followers, reflecting a common pattern among TikTok-native artists whose secondary platforms lag their primary growth channel.
| Metric | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Spotify monthly listeners | ~1.1–1.15 million | Late 2025 |
| Career Spotify streams (cumulative) | ~387 million | Late 2025 |
| Spotify daily stream run-rate | ~145,000/day | Late 2025 |
| TikTok followers (peak) | ~3.2–3.5 million | Mid-2021 |
| Instagram followers | ~239,800 | 2025 |
| Type | Title | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single | Killdozer | 2020 | Pre-album single |
| Single | 1-800-Close-Ur-Eyes | 2020 | Pre-album single |
| Single | Say Please! | 2020 | Pre-album single |
| Single | Paparazzi (Lady Gaga cover) | 2020 | Viral breakout track |
| Single | Make Me Famous | 2022 | Later placed on debut album |
| Single | Drown | 2022 | Later placed on debut album |
| Single | Seventy Thorns (feat. Jonathan Davis) | 2023 | Later placed on debut album |
| Single | Hysterics | 2023 | Pre-album single |
| Single | Death Before Designer (feat. SosMula) | 2023 | Pre-album single |
| Single | Land of the Sun | 2023 | Later placed on debut album |
| Album | A Gradual Decline in Morale | 2023 | 20 tracks; debut studio album, released July 14 |
| Single | In Threes | 2025 | First new solo material since the 2023 album, released October 31 |
Selected guest features: "The Bard's Last Note" (Ricky Desktop, 2020); "Vinny Rotten" (SosMula, 2021); "Червь / Worm" (IC3PEAK, 2022); "Artificial Anatomy" (Left to Suffer, 2023); "W H A T" (Tech N9ne feat. HU$H, 2023); "Lubricant Like Kerosene" (SeeYouSpaceCowboy..., 2024); "Candy Man" (SosMula, 2024); "Luther Interlude" (Warriors, Lin-Manuel Miranda & Eisa Davis, 2024); "Heretic" (In This Moment, 2025).
Kim Dracula's rise sits within a broader wave of internet-first metal and alt-rock acts who reached major-label attention through TikTok covers rather than traditional touring circuits, a path shared in different forms by acts like VIOLENT VIRA, who joins Kim's 2026 European and UK tour as direct support for her own first overseas live dates. Readers interested in the darker, theatrical end of the current alt-metal and dark-pop landscape may also want to explore entries on Ekkstacy and Artemas, artists operating in adjacent, mood-driven corners of the genre spectrum, though Kim Dracula's specific fusion of nu-metal, trap, industrial, jazz, and hyperpop, paired with a claimed six-octave vocal range, remains distinct within that landscape.