New music video from Ferdinand fka Left Boy

Vienna’s Ferdinand, formerly known as Left Boy, has built a career on reinvention, talent and pure creative drive. His journey began as a teenager experimenting with DJing and beatboxing, going as far as co-organising the first Beatbox World Championship. By 16, he’d written his first song, and two years later he was living in New York, completing an audio engineering course at the Institute of Audio Research while immersing himself in the city’s rap scene.

Soon after, he settled in Brooklyn and by December 2010 had unveiled his debut mixtape, The Second Coming, accompanied by a string of inventive music videos that marked him as a visual as well as musical innovator. By 2012, without the backing of a record deal, Left Boy was playing major festivals like FM4 Frequency, Sea of Love, HipHop Open, performing with the high-energy dance crew Urban Movements. His breakthrough single, “Black Dress,” landed in 2013 via Warner Music, but his ambitions were always broader than the conventional release cycle.

Now, under his own name, Ferdinand has signed an all-encompassing deal with the new media company Say10.com, one that grants rights to his past, present and future projects and positions him as the company’s official spokesperson. Crucially, it’s also cleared the way for the release of an album that has been stalled for years. That album is Diablo, a conceptual, maximalist project shaped by Ferdinand’s love of electronic music, supercars and his own worldview. Crafted over seven painstaking years and sound engineered by The Fire Dept., it represents the most ambitious work of his career.

The second track from the seven-song set, titled “Boiler Room,” arrives as a piece that fuses nostalgia with forward-thinking production, sampling the iconic dance anthem “Meet Her at the Love Parade” while reimagining it through Ferdinand’s lens. The idea began to form after a Boiler Room night in 2018 and over the years it developed into something unusual, infectious and wholly in line with his knack for bending familiar sounds into new shapes.

Brought in by Ferdinand’s slick rapped flow, the stutter of synths and rising rustle of percussion builds up around his voice before launching into a dance-focused rap jam packed full of instantly catchy hooks and lively energy. Led by Ferdinand’s razor-sharp vocal delivery and a colourful synth-driven arrangement, cut with a hidden feature from long-time collaborator Sofie Royer, it’s a grooving electronic pop anthem that’s original and exhilarating in equal measure.

Paired with the single is a music video that brings the track alive on screen featuring Ferdinand performing in a boiler room setting, joined by a satanic figure and puppet, offering an engaging visual pairing for the music. As he continues to go from strength to strength with each move and with his Diablo project on the horizon, we can’t wait to see what he’s got in store next.

Watch the music video for Boiler Room below

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