Meet the Australian global chart-topper you’ve probably never heard of

The list of most-streamed Australian artists outside of Australia on Spotify last year contains plenty of names even the most casual music fan will recognise: Gotye, The Kid Laroi, Troye Sivan, Tame Impala, Kylie Minogue and Keith Urban among them. But the name at the top … well, maybe not so much.

Cyril Riley, the 27-year-old Darwin-based producer who releases music as CYRIL, doesn’t just sit proudly atop the Spotify top 30. He also has two more songs on the streamer’s global impact list 2024. Not bad for a guy who not so long ago was using meth and sleeping rough in his car.

Cyril Riley, aka CYRIL, was the most streamed Australian artist in territories outside Australia in 2024. Credit: Michelle Grace Hunder

“It’s hard to take in,” says Riley with the understatement characteristic of someone raised in an outback town (Euabalong, population 50, in central-western NSW). “There’s no financial problems, I’ve had my dreams come true, I can DJ most of the year, I can make music and I can get it released now. It’s hard to take in just how much has actually happened.”

When Riley tells his story, he uses the phrase “fast-forward” a lot. It’s a way of joining the dots and skipping them too, and bringing some order to a tale that has its fair share of chaos.

Music has always been part of his life. “I started playing guitar when I was about two years old, started playing piano at six and drums when I was seven, and just random instruments from then,” he says.

As a kid, he’d sit on the porch of the local pub and play guitar while his mate Bob – about 50 years his senior – sang. Occasionally, a Harley-riding fellow called Beast would turn up with his guitar (“he taught me how to play lead”), and once or twice Shannon Noll’s brother Damian jammed too.

Spotify’s Global Impact List ranks the top 30 songs by Australian artists in terms of streams outside Australia. Credit: Spotify

“We’d play Johnny Cash and Conway Twitty and Garth Brooks,” he says. “I wasn’t allowed to play pop at the pub.”

By 14, Riley had found his way to house music. And by 17, he realised it was what he wanted to do with his life.

He dropped out of school and started DJing at the X-Base backpackers on Magnetic Island, paying his weekly fare from Townsville in return for a bunk for the night and breakfast in the morning.

“I was paying for knowledge,” he says. “I wanted to be around it, see what people were listening to. And I found that house was the universal sound most people would dance to. So I’d go back to Townsville, try to make more house music, I’d suck at it, I’d never play it. And then, you know, fast-forward six years and I’m all right at it.”

He’s “all right” enough that his remix of American heavy metal act Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence (yes, the Simon and Garfunkel song) topped the end-of-year chart, his remix of Teddy Swims’ The Door was at 18, and his collaboration with Dean Lewis on Fall At Your Feet was at 24.

Spotify won’t reveal how many streams any individual track has had, but collectively the top 30 clocked up 1.8 billion streams globally.

On Instagram in early December, Riley posted that his tracks had been streamed 839 million times in 2024, a figure he estimates climbed another 10 million or so by year’s end.

That equates to decent coin. At around 0.4 cents per stream, Riley’s tracks would have generated about $3.4 million in royalties from Spotify alone. (The money goes to the rights holder, typically a label, and the artist is paid according to the terms of their deal.)

Riley credits nostalgia with setting him on the track to success.

CYRIL performs at last year’s ARIA Awards at Hordern Pavilion.Credit: Getty Images

He was listening to the radio one day in 2023 when Stumblin’ In, the 1978 track by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman (lead singer of soft-rock band Smokie), came on. “I used to play that song on guitar, and I was like, ‘I need to remake this’,” he says.

He laid down the base of his remix, he claims, “in 15 minutes”. The final track took a couple more days. For the video, he splashed $400 on lights from K-Mart, put on the bucket hat (a gift from his brother-in-law) that has now become his trademark, and wandered around a deserted mansion with a Harry Potter goblet (“I love Harry Potter”) from his mother-in-law.

“I put all that in the video,” he says. “And then, you know, Bob’s your uncle, mate.”

Indeed it is. That song has had more than 500 million streams, and Cyril Riley is stumbling into a life that would once have been unimaginable … on fast-forward.

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