Pop artist, fashion provocateur, and LGBTQ+ cult icon Brandon Hilton has released The Legacy Collection, a massive 50 track career spanning album. Part greatest hits, part victory lap, the release debuted at number one on the iTunesdance charts. A major moment for an independent queer pop artist in 2025!
If you had a MySpace account back in the day, the name Brandon Hilton alone is enough to trigger instant nostalgia, it certainly does for me. His return to music marks a new chapter rooted in legacy, resilience, and unapologetic queerness. The Legacy Collection acts as both celebration and reclamation: a definitive anthology charting Brandon’s evolution across eras, from fan favourite hits and underground cult classics to defining tracks from his MySpace era (my personal fave era), right through to his present day resurgence with new cuts like ’Til The AM and Internet Celebrity.
Within days of its release, the album skyrocketed from outside the Top 200 to the top spot, a testament to fierce fan loyalty and a renewed cultural moment. Now, let’s dive headfirst into an exclusive conversation with Mr Hilton himself.
DALEYPOP: For our readers new to the name or weren't addicted to MySpace like us, who is Brandon Hilton? And huge congratulations on the number one!
BRANDON HILTON: THANK YOU Dale, I appreciate you! Well, Brandon Hilton is a little bit of everything. I started as an "internet celebrity” back in 2007 (like you said, the MySpace days) doing crazy photo shoots in a garage with my grandma and posting them online. Within a year of signing up for MySpace I’d become the 7th most popular user and had over a million friends. I used that popularity to launch myself in music, TV, movies, fashion and branding. I was the first to drop a makeup collaboration called Hard To Heel (on MySpace) before any other personalities did. I just kinda took the internet by storm, no one was using it as a marketing tool like I was. A lot of people really hated me for it but they just didn’t understand at the time, now everyone’s doing what I laid the blueprints of, which is kinda wild looking back for this interview!
From there everything else just kinda fell into place, I worked at Radio Disneyas the voice of Disney XD for a minute and I met some music producers who wanted to work with me, one being Nate Bosley who was also working with Selena Gomez and Hollywood Records at the time, working with all the major Disney kids. He produced my songs Hollywood, So Ready and Secret Lover and we recorded even more but they were never released. My success online also caught the attention of some TV and film folks who reached out to put me in various things, I did a Saving Britney Spears documentary and a Paris Hilton TV show pilot that never aired and that’s where I got to meet Paris, a dream come true! I also became kind of iconic for hanging out with Lady Gaga a lot in the early pre The Fame days. And then I landed my first movie role in the LGBTQ+ cult classic Midnight Cabaret that I star in. (Streaming free on YouTube, hopefully on Tubi soon). I’ve since done some other movies but this is the one I’m most proud of, I’m an executive producer on it!
I’ve had a crazy life, and then at the height of my “fame”, in 2015, my grandma committed suicide and that pretty much derailed everything, she was my world and that sent me into a dark depression that I stayed in for years.
I disappeared from the world, started using drugs and doing sex work to survive, it was a rough time.
I completely lost my will to create after she died and it took me years to get it back. Doing COVID I started dabbling in music again and within a few months and finding a new producer (JNC0CAT) we were able to revive me and get me singing again.
I also launched a fashion brand (THE HOUSE OF MANN) that I run with my partner and we make costumes for artists like Slayyyter, Dorian Electra, Kim Petras, Alyssa Edwards, Allie X and tons more.
See, Brandon Hilton is a little bit of everything!
