Alan Walker has spent the past decade trying to outrun a hit. “Faded” blew up in 2015, and while most DJs would cash in with merch drops and bottle service gigs, Walker went full Tolkien. He built a cinematic universe. Now there’s Walker World: The Last Ride, an app, a sequel album, and enough lore to give the MCU a panic attack.
“I think it’s something people resonate with—the emotion in the melodies,” he says. “If you’re feeling sad, the song is sad. If you’re feeling happy, it’s happy.” That’s not marketing copy; it’s how Walker’s wired. He talks about “connection” like a monk with a soundboard. The guy tours endlessly, and yet instead of disintegrating into a Red Bull husk, he’s built a digital utopia for his fans. World of Walker isn’t just a gimmick—it’s a community platform, a social network, a streaming service, and probably a better-functioning app than whatever Twitter’s called this week.
“We only reach a small portion of our followers with the algorithm,” he says. “So why not create our own thing and see what happens?” He’s not wrong. The app lets him bypass traditional platforms entirely. “We can give people the music releases, everything—handle our own streaming.”
All this comes just after wrapping a 1.5-year world tour. “We’ve been all around the world playing the Walker shows,” he says. “Central Park is next, and that’s pretty exciting.” He credits his crew—and his girlfriend—for helping him stay sane. “We don’t really have rituals,” he shrugs, “except maybe an energy drink before the show.”
The new single, Me, Myself and the Night, signals the start of what he calls a “core Alan Walker era.” Translation: expect more tracks that sound like 2016, the golden age of hoodies, shadows, and Scandinavian gloom-pop.
“We’ve followed trends, but now I’m going back to what made me who I am. Not everything we’ve done has sounded 100% like Alan Walker,” he admits. “This does.”
He’s also chasing something bigger. “The idea is to tell a story across the music, the videos, and now the movies.” If this all sounds suspiciously close to a rock opera, that’s because it is. “We could,” he says, when asked directly. “We’ve built this cinematic universe already—why not go further?”
For a guy who still describes himself as shy, he’s remarkably comfortable making grand, wildly ambitious creative swings. Maybe that’s because he started online, in music forums, quietly trading plugins and tips. “I didn’t want to share my music with family or friends—I was scared,” he says. “But online, it was different. That’s how I connected.”
He remembers what it was like to meet Tiësto for the first time—how intimidated he was, how kind the EDM legend turned out to be. “He welcomed me like a brother,” Walker says. “That’s when I realized these huge names are just regular people. That I belonged.”
He’s 27 now. Ten years into a career that started in his bedroom and now includes app development, immersive films, and, oh right, billions of streams. “It’s been a wild journey,” he says. “But I’m really grateful for every mile, and every person who’s come to one of my shows.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
