Jeff Ihaza
Contact Jeff Ihaza by Email View all posts by Jeff Ihaza August 24, 2026
Martin Andrijasevic and Hamzah Al-Emad in Dawson City, Yukon. Andre Santos/@themindofandre Slushy Noobz fans inhabit something of an inner sanctum, fluent in the Toronto-based YouTube channel’s running jokes and lore. The channel, launched in 2023 by Hamzah Al-Emad, 24, and Martin Andrijasevic, 27, grew out of the pair’s friendship and a shared love of old-school gaming videos, and features everything from Minecraft role-play to restaurant reviews, road trips, and increasingly elaborate real-world challenges. On a Zoom call from a hostel room, midway through a cross-Canada livestream tour, Andrijasevic puts it more simply: “Finding entertainment in the mundane, that’s all we do.”
As members of a generation raised on YouTube, Slushy Noobz feels quietly subversive. While online entertainment aimed at young men increasingly rewards nihilism, cruelty, and humiliation (see Clavicular), Al-Emad and Andrijasevic are refreshingly normal: two friends hanging out and paying close enough attention for the banal to become strange. Before Slushy Noobz, both made short-form videos on their own. They talked through DMs, became online friends, and eventually met in person. Andrijasevic was living in Ottawa; he later moved to Toronto so they could make videos more regularly. Their early videos revived the spirit of 2010s-era YouTube: two grown men playing video games and treating a newly adopted dog like the center of an elaborate mythology. Other days, they wandered Toronto with an iPhone or simply turned on the camera while they were already hanging out. The channel now has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.
Their growing popularity has also produced an increasingly strange collection of celebrity crossovers. Al-Emad and Andrijasevic have gone live with NLE Choppa, while Andrijasevic appeared alongside the rapper in a Marc Jacobs campaign and, more recently, popped up in a Lil Uzi Vert music video. This summer, they partnered with Toronto underground music festival First Class Fest, which boasts headliners like Osamason and Lancey Foux, Lucki and Nettspend. “We’ve just brushed up so many times with this underground sound,” Andrijasevic says. “We’re friends with a couple of producers here and friends with some artists. I think we just fall naturally in this place.”
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
View this post on Instagram
Earlier this summer, inspired by the globetrotting extravagance of 21-year-old streamer IShowSpeed’s marathon travel streams, the Slushy Noobz boys tried to take their friendship live across Canada. On Speed’s streams, hordes of screaming fans, “stream snipers” tracking his whereabouts in real time, and locals who have no idea what’s going on can suddenly find themselves in the middle of one of the internet’s most popular primetime shows.
Along with their production crew, who went ahead to test internet connections, meet locals, and scout each stop, Al-Emad and Andrijasevic were less concerned with manufacturing confrontations than letting local people show them around. They beaded with Indigenous elders and went fishing in Newfoundland with someone for whom catching and cooking fish was simply daily life. At other stops, they sought out local figures who carried their own kind of small-town fame.
They thought about tone from the start. As it currently exists, IRL streaming is often fueled by the desire to see drama play out live on camera. Strangers can become props, and public spaces can turn into film sets no one agreed to take part in. During our first conversation, Andrijasevic says the genre had “a harassment air to it.”
Like all content creators in 2026, Andrijasevic and Al-Emad know fan-created clips help spread their videos across social media. A stray moment could reach people who had never watched them before. Earlier this year, one of their clips caught the attention of PlaqueBoyMax, a streamer and musician known for making songs live with guests. He invited them onto his stream the next day. “He didn’t even really know who we were, it seemed like,” Al-Emad says. “It was just sort of ‘clips recognized clips.’”
Related Content
Social Media Dread Is Everywhere. These Authors Turned It Into New Worlds
Studios Want Creators. Do Creators Want Them?
Deep Cuts, Hits, and a Choir: Foo Fighters’ Hollywood Bowl Debut Sends Off Gustavo Dudamel With a Bang
Bret Michaels Cancels All 2026 Tour Dates for 'Rest and Recovery' After Recent Surgeries
They eventually joined Max on stream and recorded a vocal drop he could use as a producer tag, the audio signature that identifies a beat or producer. “I’m going to be honest, bro. Like, we on the internet, everyone’s so judgmental. We just got to stand out and be ourselves,” Max told them during the stream. Around the same time, people were picking apart whether Max himself was masculine enough, calling him “zesty” and criticizing his tattoo of the word “diva.” Andrijasevic texted him to ignore it. “Being that invested in someone else’s business is crazy,” he says. “I get ‘zesty’ allegations a lot, but it is what it is.”
By our second call, the trek had cured them of a few assumptions about streaming. Al-Emad says it takes “a certain type of person” to stay on for so long while also thinking about “short-form, clippable moments all the time.” They gave it their best shot, he says, but “there’s just some people who are bred for this and that’s not us.”
Andrijasevic went into the tour thinking they’d be naturally good at IRL streaming. As the trip went on, he says, they stopped trying to squeeze a video out of every stop. They became more interested in “authentically experiencing everything.” “It’s just so much harder than we expected,” he says. Their usual videos draw on spontaneous moments but have the benefit of editing, allowing them to shape the way diversions can play into the bit.
