Young & Sick

Dutch-born illustrator and songwriter Nick Van Hofwegen records under the moniker Young & Sick, a project that fuses his signature visual style with electronic-tinged pop songs. He first gained notice in 2011 through album artwork created for Foster the People, Maroon 5, Skrillex, and additional acts, before stepping forward as a recording artist with the self-titled Young & Sick LP in 2014.

Growing up in the southern Netherlands, Van Hofwegen performed guitar in local groups until he shifted his focus to visual work at design school. A class assignment prompted him to produce imagery drawing from California band Velvet Teen; after his instructor encouraged outreach, the group enlisted him for tour visuals. Operating as Young & Sick, he relocated first to London and later to Los Angeles, where those earlier Velvet Teen ties introduced him to Foster the People’s Mark Foster. Foster commissioned the cover for the band’s 2011 debut Torches, and the following year Van Hofwegen supplied artwork for Maroon 5’s Overexposed. His designs also appeared in an Urban Outfitters clothing collection.

Concurrently he began issuing music under the Young & Sick name, starting with the independent downtempo, R&B-inflected single “House of Spirits.” Additional solo tracks surfaced toward the end of 2012 alongside a collaboration with Irish electronic artist Mmoths titled “For Her.” While maintaining his output of recordings, he took on further design assignments, among them the cover for Robin Thicke’s chart-topping 2013 album Blurred Lines and the full branding package for New Orleans’ large-scale BUKU music and arts festival. In 2013 he entered a recording agreement with the Capitol imprint Harvest Records.

Van Hofwegen delivered his debut full-length Young & Sick in April 2014, spotlighting the tracks “Glass” and “Heartache Fetish,” and mounted the project’s inaugural live performances, including a slot at California’s Coachella Festival. Outside music he continued supplying visuals, completing the artwork for Foster the People’s Supermodel and painting a 148-by-126-foot mural on an L.A. building that became the largest ever installed on the American West Coast. In 2015 he joined Le Tigre’s JD Samson for the side project SHARER, releasing the single “Body Tonight.”

Young & Sick returned in 2018 with the No Static EP, which contained a cover of T-Pain’s “Up Down (Do This All Day).” That same year he contributed a version of Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” to NGX: Ten Years of Neon Gold, the tenth-anniversary compilation from Neon Gold Records. In spring 2019 he issued the EP It’s a Storm.