Joel Houston spent the better part of three years making music alone, late at night, with no real intention of releasing any of it. In 2024 he finally did. His solo project AMXNradio — the name is “Amen,” with a cross in the middle — put out its debut album that year, and now he’s back with a second: Silhouettes. The sound is nothing like what most people expect from a co-founder of Hillsong United. He’s fine with that. In fact, he thinks more Christian artists should try it.
He has a theory about why Hillsong United broke through when it did: they didn’t know the rules.
“We listened to Radiohead and we listened to Blink-182,” he says. “That’s the music we liked. We weren’t into DC Talk. And then we started making music for a youth group and it was like, yeah, these are really genuine songs to God, but they sound like — we didn’t know you couldn’t do that.”
The accidental freedom of growing up in Sydney, not Nashville, gave United a sound that didn’t fit the existing boxes. It worked. Now, decades later, Houston sees the same energy stirring in Christian music again, and he thinks it’s long overdue.
“Everything got really safe,” he says of the industry he helped shape. “I understand both sides of it. But I’m deep down — I just feel like that 2% needs to grow.”
Christian music’s 2% slice of the general market has long been a quiet frustration for Houston. He’s quick to note that plenty of Christians are out there consuming music; they’re just listening to country, Americana, EDM and rock. The issue, he argues, is ambition, not audience size.
What’s shifted recently, at least in his view, is that a new generation of artists didn’t get that memo. He sees an indie Christian movement spreading through TikTok — kids who love a certain sound and just make it, not asking whether it belongs in a Christian lane, doing what Hillsong United once did without realizing it.
“God’s just going to breathe something new in the next generation,” Houston says. “They’re going to break the rules, not know they’re breaking them. And then everybody’s going to come around and try and figure out how to pull that in. That’s always been the way.”
Beyond the sound, Houston is also rethinking what music is being asked to do. He’s spent a lot of time with the Psalms lately — most of them, he notes, probably wouldn’t work in a Sunday service by today’s standards. They start in one emotional place and journey to another, raw and wandering in ways that don’t fit neatly between announcements and the offering.
“There should be a soundtrack for all those other moments,” he says — the car rides, the late nights, the runs, the mundane in-between times that make up the majority of a person’s week. “Music is such an incredible gift that God’s given the world. For us to limit that to just what works in a church service or on Christian radio — we’re missing out on maybe the breadth of what music can do.”
He describes good art with a phrase he keeps coming back to: it has the ability to enter our soul without our permission. For Houston, using that power is the whole point — and he believes Christian artists are chronically leaving it on the table.
“Creative spaces are a mission field,” he says. “And as artists, it’s not my job to write music that’s going to save the world. It’s my job to bring what I’ve got as an offering and put it there.”
Houston is also honest about what it costs to stay safe. He’s watched friends achieve the kind of success that looks great from the outside and felt the weight that comes with it. Success, he says, comes with its own pressures — expectations that pile up quietly until the thing you loved starts to feel like a job. The joy goes, and you don’t always notice until it’s gone.
His advice to artists sitting on passion projects, afraid of the metrics being visible to everyone, cuts through the noise: know why you’re doing it before the world gets a chance to judge whether it’s working. “The process is the destination,” he says, a little sheepishly, aware it sounds like a cliché. But he means it.
“If I never made a cent from it,” he says, “I honestly think I’d still be here late every single night writing songs. Because I actually just love it.”
What Houston wants — more than streams, more than growth — is for that love to give other artists permission. Permission to go further, get weirder, trust that something in people can be reached by music that doesn’t fit any existing format. He knows there are artists in his circle who want to be more adventurous and hold back. He was one of them for years. AMXNradio is him finally not.
“We need fearless creativity in the kingdom,” he says. “And more of it.”
