Sebastian Schub throws himself headfirst into joy on “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical),” an exuberant folk rock rush that finds the singer/songwriter trading overthinking for instinct and surrounding himself with the people he loves. Speaking with Atwood Magazine, Schub reflects on the emotional range of his recent music – from dizzying euphoria to urban loneliness and hard-won self-reassurance – as he embraces a more organic, live-wire approach to songwriting. An undeniable artist-to-watch, Schub has never sounded freer, more open-hearted, or more alive.
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Stream: “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical)” – Sebastian Schub
Every once in a while, happiness hits so hard it becomes almost physical – a rush in the chest, a grin you can’t suppress, the delirious conviction that life is, in fact, f***ing wonderful.
In those rare, radiant moments, everything tastes sweeter, everyone you love seems a little magical, and being alive feels like the greatest idea anyone’s ever had, full stop. You want to hold onto that feeling with both hands and squeeze every last drop from it while it lasts.
Blissful, effervescent, and irrepressible, Sebastian Schub’s “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical)” is euphoria manifest in song – a sun-kissed, dazzling folk rock celebration overflowing with love, light, sweetness, and the sheer pleasure of realizing life can occasionally be this effing good. Guitars sparkle and surge, voices pile gleefully atop one another, and Schub sings with the feverish conviction of someone trying to soak up the whole moment before it passes.
“Oh, baby, baby, you give it to me, the kiss of life / it feels so good, if this is heaven, then I wanna die,” he cries, before landing on the simplest possible declaration: “Baby, baby, life is f***ing so nice.” There’s no cool remove here, no emotional half-step, no attempt to disguise sincerity as irony. As irresistible as it is utterly exuberant, “kiss of life.” throws itself head over heels into happiness – and good luck not going with it.
Punch a wall, blow a kiss
I never thought I could feel this
Life ain’t so shitty when love is bliss
Didn’t ever score, now I never miss
Some call it lucky, I call it fate
It takes time, but it’s never late
Well, love jumps to the ones who wait
Wasn’t feeling good, now I’m feeling great
Released July 3 via Island EMI/Capitol Records as Schub’s first new music of the year, “kiss of life.” opens another chapter for the Hamburg-born, London-based singer/songwriter a year after his Sing Like Madonna EP. One of Atwood Magazine’s artists to watch, Schub cut his teeth in London’s open-mic rooms before graduating to support slots with Noah Kahan and Asha Banks, sold-out “early versions” pop-ups across the UK and Europe, and now his own headline shows. More recently, Sam Smith personally selected him for a support slot at the London Coliseum, while Schub’s autumn headline run has taken him from Dublin and Glasgow through Paris, Cologne, Berlin, and back home to Hamburg. Yet for all that upward movement, the most exciting thing about “kiss of life.” is how little it sounds concerned with arrival, achievement, or proving anything at all. This is music made in the ecstatic present tense – loose-limbed, gloriously alive, and intoxicated by the people already standing beside him.
Schub’s road to those rooms began much earlier. He moved from Hamburg to London at 15, leaving the rest of his family in Germany and carrying with him a sense of cultural displacement that would linger beneath his songwriting. By 17, he was already supporting himself through music as a busker, function player, and session musician. Songwriting came a year later almost by necessity: Schub wanted to perform at London’s Spiritual Bar, only to discover that the venue allowed original material rather than covers. So he went away, wrote what he later affectionately called “a bunch of quite terrible songs,” and kept coming back.
Years of that work eventually fed into 2024’s “Sing Like Madonna,” the explosive major-label debut that introduced Schub to Atwood Magazine and gave his first EP its name. Written in his basement while the dream he had chased for years was beginning to feel painfully distant, the song – hailed by Atwood as “a defining, seminal mission statement” – captured a very different kind of hunger from the pleasure spilling through “kiss of life.” “At the time I was busy gigging a few times a week,” Schub told us at the time. “And I was growing increasingly despondent and disillusioned in the pursuit of the dream. The song was born from a desire to mean something, to be able to leave a mark.”
The distance between those two songs says plenty about how much has changed. “Sing Like Madonna” looked upward with its teeth clenched, aching to be seen; “kiss of life.” looks around and realizes there is already plenty worth celebrating.
The latter track’s unguarded happiness marks a particularly delicious change of temperature for an artist whose songs have so often made a home inside yearning and hurt. Schub wanted no shadow hanging over this one, no emotional catch hidden beneath the chorus.
“I just wanted a song that was exhaustingly fun and overwhelmingly optimistic, and joyful,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “Like 100 shots of espresso. My music is often so full of yearning and hurt. For once, I just wanted it to be uncompromisingly happy.”
Uncompromisingly happy is exactly right. The seduction starts before Schub even sings a line: “Okay, mwah,” we hear, the sound of someone planting a literal kiss at the song’s threshold before everything bursts into motion. “kiss of life.” moves with the giddy logic of a crush that has temporarily reorganized reality itself: “Punch a wall, blow a kiss / I never thought I could feel this / life ain’t so shitty when love is bliss,” Schub sings in the opening verse, ricocheting from physical impulse to existential revelation in a matter of seconds. The song keeps chasing that high through images that are funny, sensual, mundane, and completely sincere. A lover becomes “the God’s truth,” but also “cold Coke on a sunny day / a yellow coat in the pouring rain / a cigarette when I need a break.” That mixture is part of the charm. Schub doesn’t need love to become lofty or abstract; its magic lives in how suddenly everything tastes better, looks brighter, and lands differently.
And then comes that chorus. “You’re kinda magic / you’re kinda magical,” he repeats with almost childlike wonder, stretching a tiny thought into something enormous through sheer force of belief. The arrangement rises around him in kind, giving the refrain the scale of a communal singalong without sanding away its sweetness. Schub’s voice carries both grain and glow, climbing into each line with enough urgency to make infatuation sound less like a private emotion than a public event. By the time the background voices come flooding in, the song has stopped resembling one person confessing love and started sounding like an entire room caught in the same rush.
Oh, baby, baby, you give it to me, the kiss of life
It feels so good, if this is heaven, then I wanna die
Why would I try to compromise on you and I?
Baby, baby, life is f***ing so nice
You are
You’re kinda magic
You’re kinda magical
You are
You’re kinda magic
You’re kinda magical
That communal feeling runs deeper than arrangement. Schub surrounded himself with the people he loves while making the record, letting friendship become part of the song’s actual physical fabric.
“Mainly because I managed to get all of my friends to sing on it,” he says of why the recording brought him so much joy. “I had a big day in the studio with everyone that’s dear to me, so that was really special. But overall, the entire process was just led by such an intuitive, live music approach. Whatever felt right in the moment in our caffeine-fueled recording session stayed on the record. I usually overthink everything, so this was quite freeing.”
The result sounds like that freedom. “kiss of life.” has polish, but it never sounds manicured into submission; its exhilaration comes from the sense that people are reacting to one another in real time, pushing the song higher because everyone in the room is having too much fun to hold back. Even its overflowing vocals carry emotional history. Two of Schub’s friends had unexpectedly become parents, helping reshape what began as a song about romantic love into something broader – an ode to friendship, gratitude, and the people who make being alive worth celebrating. Schub eventually pulled those friends directly into the recording, baby included.
A face you’d see on a magazine
Like Leonardo in ’93
Yeah, she’s a winner, a killer queen
She’s the God’s truth, you know what I mean?
Cold Coke on a sunny day
A yellow coat in the pouring rain
A cigarette when I need a break
Wasn’t feeling good, now I’m feeling great
“Songwriting can be such a lonesome quest sometimes – just sitting in your room for hours tinkering away,” Schub reflects. “I wanted the rest of the process to be filled with the people dearest to me. I know every voice that’s sung and every hand that’s played that song. Making it was basically a family affair.”
Perhaps the loveliest thing about “kiss of life.” is that its abundance isn’t an illusion manufactured by a gigantic production.
The love we hear is literally in the room. Every cheer, vocal, instrumental flourish, and spontaneous burst carries the fingerprints of Schub’s community, giving the song a warmth that no amount of studio perfection could counterfeit. Its breathlessness starts to make sense, too. When he sings “wasn’t feeling good, now I’m feeling great,” the line lands as more than romantic transformation; surrounded by the people who made the record with him, it becomes gratitude shouted back at the world.
This looseness is increasingly central to the music Schub wants to make. After spending stretches of the past year overthinking songs until, in his words, his “head was spinning,” he has been returning to the immediacy of playing music in rooms with other people – both through his intimate “early versions” shows and in the studio itself. Rather than chase pristine takes, Schub has leaned further into accident, instinct, and the strange electricity that disappears when a performance gets fussed over for too long.
“I’ve wanted to keep things as organic and alive as possible,” he says. “We often just lied to our musicians; made them play crazy takes and kept them in their entirety. It really has been a journey of finding all these beautiful mistakes and bringing them up into the light.”
It is a notable evolution for a songwriter who once described spending ages rewriting and distilling a single song.
In our first conversation, Schub explained that “Sing Like Madonna” took roughly three months to finish – fairly typical for him at the time – because he had a habit of working and reworking material until he reached its essential core. He also compared songwriting to walking into a dark room with his arms stretched out, unsure of what he was looking for until the song finally revealed itself.
The instinctive approach he is chasing now does not mean abandoning craft. It means knowing when craft has started strangling the thing that made a song exciting in the first place. His “early versions” pop-ups became part of that recalibration, giving unfinished material a life outside the studio and returning Schub to the uncomplicated exchange that first taught him how to hold a noisy room: Play the song. Watch what happens. Trust what survives.
The songs surrounding “kiss of life.” show just how much emotional territory that freedom can hold. August’s “haven’t found love.” slips into a darker groove, setting romantic hunger against a London that suddenly looks lonely. “Give me a reason / give me a rush / maybe all that I am was never really enough,” Schub sings, searching for genuine connection amid a city he describes as socially isolating and dating culture he finds almost comically bleak. October’s “before you hit the water.” retreats even further inward. Written in the back of a cab during what Schub calls “a real low point,” the gentle, melancholy song reaches toward a younger version of himself with the reassurance he needed to hear: “Catch yourself / just a little bit before you hit the water.” “I think I just needed a friendly, encouraging voice in my ears,” he says. “A soft sound to pick me up and lift me through the day.” The tenderness reaches back toward the teenager who arrived in London from Hamburg at 15 and spent years wrestling with questions of identity and belonging; where “haven’t found love.” asks whether anyone else might fill the emptiness, “before you hit the water.” begins learning how to extend some mercy inward.
“kiss of life.” may be the purest expression of Schub’s live-wire creative philosophy yet.
Its joy is tangible and infectious precisely because it retains the mess of being alive inside it – the singalong voices, the off-the-cuff takes, the caffeine, the friends, even the baby: The feeling that everybody has piled into the same room and somebody forgot to tell them to settle down. Placed beside the loneliness of “haven’t found love.” and the self-reassurance of “before you hit the water.,” its ecstasy feels less like a permanent state than one glorious end of the emotional pendulum. Schub describes his current inner world as a constant tossing between “extreme highs and hopeless lows,” and “kiss of life.” plants its flag firmly at the highest possible point: Not contentment, but exhilaration; not affection politely expressed, but love spilling everywhere.
Happiness this uninhibited can make cynicism look awfully boring. “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical)” is feverish, romantic, playful, dramatic, breathtakingly beautiful, and – above everything else – so much fun. Schub wanted the musical equivalent of 100 shots of espresso, and somehow he made something even more intoxicating: a song that makes friendship feel sacred, infatuation feel infinite, and an ordinary sunny day seem like proof that the universe has briefly gotten everything right.
Turn it up. Throw the windows open. Call somebody you love.
Life is f***ing so nice.
Speaking with Atwood Magazine, Schub reflects on the freedom he has found by loosening his grip on the creative process, the wildly different emotional poles shaping his recent songs, and why making music with other people has brought him back to what he loves about it in the first place.
Dive into our candid conversation below, and meet an artist learning to stop overthinking the joy in front of him, turn it all the way up, and enjoy the hell out of it while it’s here.
Oh, baby, baby, you give it to me, the kiss of life
It feels so good, if this is heaven, then I wanna die
Why would I try to compromise on you and I?
Baby, baby, life is f***ing so nice
You are
You’re kinda magic
You’re kinda magical
You are
You’re kinda magic
You’re kinda magical
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:: stream/purchase kiss of life. here ::
:: connect with Sebastian Schub here ::
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A CONVERSATION WITH SEBASTIAN SCHUB
Atwood Magazine: Sebastian, welcome back to Atwood! When we first spoke about a year and a half ago, you described yourself as Hozier and Jeff Buckley's little adopted German son. Does that description still hold?
Sebastian Schub: Thanks for having me. Oh dear, did I really say that? I must have been on some terrible high.
It’s been a year since the release of your debut EP, Sing Like Madonna. What’s your relationship with that EP and its songs today?
Sebastian Schub: I just have so, so much love for them still. I can’t wait to sing them with everyone on tour in October.
You’ve described “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical)” as the most fun you’ve ever had making a record. What made this one feel so joyful?
Sebastian Schub: Mainly because I managed to get all of my friends to sing on it. I had a big day in the studio with everyone that’s dear to me, so that was really special. But overall, the entire process was just led by such an intuitive, live music approach. Whatever felt right in the moment in our caffeine-fueled recording session stayed on the record. I usually overthink everything, so this was quite freeing.
The song feels like a full-body celebration of love, friendship, gratitude, and losing your inhibitions. I especially love how unabashed the chorus is: “you’re kinda magic / you’re kinda magical.” What’s the story behind this song, and why did it feel important to let it be so open-hearted?
Sebastian Schub: I just wanted a song that was exhaustingly fun and overwhelmingly optimistic, and joyful. Like 100 shots of espresso. My music is often so full of yearning and hurt. For once, I just wanted it to be uncompromisingly happy.
You’ve said “kiss of life.” became an ode to your friends and the people around you, including two friends who unexpectedly became parents. How did that shape the heart of the song?
Sebastian Schub: Songwriting can be such a lonesome quest sometimes – just sitting in your room for hours tinkering away. I wanted the rest of the process to be filled with the people dearest to me. I know every voice that’s sung and every hand that’s played that song. Making it was basically a family affair.
“haven’t found love.” feels like a different side of this new chapter – groovier, more sultry, and more reflective. What were you trying to capture about still searching for love?
Sebastian Schub: I do love groovy music, but I also often feel depressed, so that makes for an interesting dish.
Living in London is like nothing else, but at times it’s so lonely and isolating. I always find myself having to schedule social interactions in like doctor’s appointments. And the dating etiquette is so appalling – it’s shocking really.
“kiss of life.” and “haven’t found love.” seem to look at love from two very different angles: One overflowing with joy and gratitude, the other sitting with the realization that you may still be searching. How do those two songs speak to each other?
Sebastian Schub: I think at the moment, I find myself constantly being tossed around between these extreme highs and hopeless lows. Maneuvering that has been tricky at times, but I think that dichotomy often bleeds into the songs.
Can you also share a bit about your latest single, “before you hit the water.”?
Sebastian Schub: I wrote ‘before you hit the water.’ when I was at a real low point. I think I just needed a friendly, encouraging voice in my ears. A soft sound to pick me up and lift me through the day.
You’ve been playing your “early versions” pop-up shows and stepping into headline rooms. How has bringing these new songs directly to intimate audiences shaped how you hear them?
Sebastian Schub: Over the past year, I spent so much time overthinking songs in the studio until my head was spinning. Going back to just playing the songs to people in a room has been wonderful.
Across these two singles, there’s a lot of color, freedom, and emotional honesty. How do they point toward the larger world of music you’re making now?
Sebastian Schub: I’ve wanted to keep things as organic and alive as possible. We often just lied to our musicians; made them play crazy takes and kept them in their entirety. It really has been a journey of finding all these beautiful mistakes and bringing them up into the light.
In the spirit of paying it forward, who are you listening to these days that you’d recommend to our readers?
Sebastian Schub: Currently, I’m re-engulfing myself in Glen Hansard’s work. And there is so much of it. The Frames albums particularly are in my ears every day at the moment. His songs have always littered my walls, but since his passing, I’ve been listening to little else. He was a real giant.
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:: stream/purchase kiss of life. here ::
:: connect with Sebastian Schub here ::
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Stream: “kiss of life. (you’re kinda magical)” – Sebastian Schub
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