Cavetown is trying to change

At least not historically. This isn’t to say that I’ve actively disliked the English songwriter’s music as it’s inevitably bled into view, but as a 31-year-old who spent their teens and early twenties worshipping Paul Westerberg and Bob Mould, Cavetown’s self-admittedly “young” sound wasn’t something that particularly captivated me. When I’m sent a call list in October, several assignments make more sense personally. Guided by Voices has a billion albums and decades of history. The Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas and involvement with Moral Orel are both personally formative. But I ask for Cavetown for two reasons.

The first is I have a friend – also a musician – who is a big fan. They had some lingering regrets around the questions they’d not been able to ask at one of Cavetown’s post-show Q&As. The opportunity seemed serendipitous. Second – and more relevant to those reading – is that I found myself oddly drawn to the early singles from Cavetown’s upcoming album, Running With Scissors. They didn’t represent a complete 180-degree pivot, but they were curious, exploratory, and dense in ways I’d not been used to hearing from Skinner. It sounds as though he’s trying to break free of something. So I ask if he sees his early success as a teen artist as a trap.

“It’s definitely something that’s been on my mind for a while,” Skinner admits. “Having this great appreciation for these songs and the people that they managed to connect me with, but at the same time, I have this love/hate relationship with them. It’s been so long since I wrote them, and elements of my voice and my production style, I feel aren’t representative of where I’m at now. I want my most listened to stuff to be me now and not make me cringe to listen to it. I’m excited to have people like yourself who haven’t historically listened to the music but feel drawn in by the new stuff.”

The “balance” is a common conundrum for any artist who happens to find a large audience while young. Cavetown caught the YouTube musician wave in the early-2010s, uploading his first song to the channel and his earliest “unofficial” albums to Bandcamp at the age of 14. Simple, charming, twee: Cavetown’s early music captured the imaginations of other young people dwelling on the internet, incidentally becoming a sort of bedroom pop godfather for those who’d come to realise that the landscape was changing, and that making music and reaching people had become more accessible.

His true debut single “This Is Home” and self-titled album came in 2015, at the age of 17: ten years ago. If you go to Spotify now, you’ll find “This Is Home” and “Devil Town” (the biggest hit from Cavetown) right at the top of his “Popular” chart, which is to say that even in 2026, most people are likely to be introduced to 17-year-old Robin Skinner before 27-year-old Robin Skinner. You can likely imagine the dissonance: the thing that brought you to where you are is also something that keeps part of your image trapped in the past. Consider how long it took Tyler, the Creator to truly shake his early Odd Future rep, or how Rebecca Black is still working to shirk her “Friday” reputation.

Skinner’s own journey to redefine himself may not feel quite as urgent as those examples, but it’s still a public effort to be seen differently, cast in the monumental shadow of teenage success.

“It’s a difficult balance,” Skinner says. “Trying to cater to my longest-term fans and make something that still connects with them, but also expanding my horizons and trying to bring in new listeners from older generations. or more so just the generation that I’m in. I think I’ve had a wide spread of age groups who listened to me over the years, but it’s definitely been primarily younger teenagers, because that’s the place I wrote everything from at the start. So it makes total sense that it’s felt a little like I pigeonholed myself into this generational group.

“But at the same time, I did an acoustic set in LA and there were some people in the front row that I’ve seen come to like every single LA show that I’ve ever done, and every single time, they look more grown up, their style is changing. It’s really cool to see that happen in front of me. I stayed behind and talked to these people afterwards, because I wanted to know what was going on with them and to hear them be so excited about me also growing up in front of them and the music changing and growing, it really made me feel good about my intentions. It’s definitely difficult, but I’m up for the challenge in this album.”

This album, Running With Scissors, isn’t so much about an obvious play for being seen as “mature,” so much as it aims to shake up the Cavetown image. It’s Skinner at his most playful, delving into more elaborate production techniques, song structures, and genre mashups. The singles begin to tease this: “Rainbow Gal” fluctuates between hypersurreal high-fidelity synths and fuzzier bitpop sections to create textural counterpoint, while also employing a variety of vocal filters, crafting an atmosphere of continuous, propulsive “change.” The songwriting itself is linear and economical, but Skinner does so much with sound that the less-than-2:30-minute pop song feels as though it has full-blown movements. This level of compact dynamism has largely been absent from his past music, inching closer to Porter Robinson while still maintaining the core of what makes Cavetown… Cavetown.

It’s worth noting that this is the longest gap between albums for Skinner since he began recording. I ask if this has to do with really wanting to make a statement with this album, or if it just has to do with slowing down from age.

“A bit of column A, column B,” he tells me. “When I was getting started in the early years, I had a lot more freedom, time-wise, with how I could release stuff. I still have the same flow of writing, where I’m just constantly thinking of new songs. I already have a bunch of songs I’m working on for a deluxe version of the album. At a certain point I’m just like, ‘all right, album time. Let’s put all of these together into one thing.’

“I’ve never been very good at curating an album as one running story or anything,” he continues. “But I felt like I really wanted to take my time with this one. And over the years too, with my management, we’ve learned together the best ways that I work and the worst ways that I work. There were a couple of projects I worked on where I felt rushed by a deadline and I didn’t feel like everything was as good as I could have possibly done. I’m sure my manager had deadlines in his mind [this time], but anytime he says them to me, it kind of stresses me out. So he just kept them to himself. And I think that’s also lent itself well to really honing in all of these tracks sonically. I’m balancing the line between my old music and my new sound, but also balancing sonically. I wanted it to sound very maximalist, but not too much at the same time. And I wanted every song to take its course, make a bunch of different crazy turns, wherever it feels like it should go, but at the same time [have] each song remain very certain in what it is as a song, and what it’s trying to say. And so having three years to really delve in has been key to where all the songs have ended up.”

Maximalism is an appropriate word, especially once you begin engaging with Running With Scissors’ deep cuts. Singles like “Tarmac” and “NPC” push things in one or two new directions. “Tarmac” feels indebted to the quiet-loud grunge stylings of Nirvana, while “NPC” leans further into geek rock: Weezer or They Might Be Giants with more electronic elements. “Baby Spoon” nearly recalls The Books’ folktronica with its plucked string loops. Skinner maintains voice, so it all still makes sense next to each other. But things only get more exciting when you listen to tracks like “Cryptid” and “Reaper,” where Cavetown truly embraces constant, unexpected turns.

“I love ‘Reaper.’ That’s been one of my favourites since its conception,” Skinner says. “That’s one of the first ones that I went into a room with someone on and I’ve done a lot of that on this album, which is a new process for me. I’ve always made everything by myself in my room, produced everything from scratch. And I’ve boxed myself in a lot and been very protective over anything that I make. It feels like if every single idea doesn’t come from my mind, I can’t claim it and be proud of it. And I wanted to start challenging that feeling and just allow more people into the space and learn from people.

“My favourite part of the process is producing,” he continues. “The most fun part for me is imagining the sounds and making them happen. It was my first session, and the morning before I went to the session, I was just lying on the floor of my Airbnb, crying, I have no ideas – I really wanted to enter the session with some starting point, and I just had absolutely nothing. And literally minutes before I ordered my Uber to go to the studio, I came up with a little mumbly tune and I voice memo-ed it through my tears. And so I took that to [my co-producer], and immediately he met me with the exact energy I needed, where he was just so excited, so eager to just watch how I work and to learn from me. It really pulled me out of that hole immediately and allowed me to just follow my gut on the whole song. And I think that’s why it became such a different sound, because I felt really encouraged by this guy who I worked with it on.”

Skinner goes on to explain how “Reaper” – a song which takes cues from recent hyperpop production – set the tone for the entire album, recalling how he afterwards wrote several songs more similar to his typical acoustic style and felt that they just didn’t match what he’d achieved through the empowerment of working with a co-producer. But he didn’t want to entirely abandon what he’d done on previous albums, so it became less about writing “old Cavetown” songs and more about preserving old Cavetown through moments amidst the new approach. Acoustic guitar is still prevalent on Running With Scissors, but it’s rarely the directing element. Instead, it may be used to bridge two new ideas together, or it may be implemented as a loop.

He also mentions certain songs on Running With Scissors falling into “groups” in his mind. To Skinner, “Reaper” is part of a trio with final pre-release single “Sailboat” – which includes the only feature on the album (a now customary duet with Chloe Moriondo) – and “Straight Through My Head,” a song which Skinner notes as drawing inspiration from Linkin Park. These three represent Skinner at his most ambitious, arrangement and production-wise. They strike me as his favourites as well, though you can definitely see a sort of leading strategy emerge in his single rollout and album order.

Take, for instance, the opening one-two of “Skip” and “Cryptid.” Skinner and I discuss how deliberate an on-ramp “Skip” is, beginning as the most straightforward acoustic guitar piece on the album, before it’s paired with a lush psychedelic soundscape, not too far off from what you might hear from Animal Collective’s more gentle 2000s work. Then there’s a seamless transition into “Cryptid,” the punky hip-hop of which reminds me slightly of King Krule. I tell Skinner this and he agrees, though he points out it was Doechii’s “Bullfrog” from Alligator Bites Don’t Heal that sparked the track.

And again, these really don’t seem like touchpoints or comparisons anyone would be making about Cavetown even three years ago, when he released Worm Food. At the time, that record, at least tonally, felt like a departure. It was far less “cute,” less apologetic in its depressiveness. It took the occasional sonic risk past what had been established within the project, but it didn’t stray far. Running With Scissors is a much more energetic record. It’s probably a more optimistic one as well. The heaviest/darkest the album gets is with “Straight Through My Head,” and it’s ultimately about Skinner winning the war against his own negative thinking.

There’s a common idea that “maturing” means embracing a certain degree of stoicism. To call the album Running With Scissors implies an embrace of an almost childlike thrill in risk-taking. And that, too, can be growth. But I think about how “Micah,” one of the comparatively simpler songs on the album, strikes me with its tenderness. And it’s because it represents change and growth from a different angle. Earlier in 2025, Skinner finally became a sibling when his little sister Micah was born.

“Naturally, that brought up a lot of feelings for me about my childhood and how life is going to be different for her,” Skinner says. “I’ve been through this experience, I’ve been learning a lot about my family, and I think that that is an overarching theme of the whole album: my sense of identity through the people that raised me and how I’m taking control of that, versus how I’m accepting pieces of the family members that raised me. I wrote that song before she was even born. I’ve always wanted a sibling, and I’d kind of resigned myself to thinking that was never going to happen for me. I was so excited. I’ve always wanted to have a little friend to grow up with. And I guess I’m not necessarily growing up with her in the normal way that I expected, but ever since I knew that she was coming into my life, I’ve been thinking about all the ways that I could influence her in a positive way and ways that I, as a brother, can protect her and and teach her about the world. And also teach her about herself and how to value her own feelings and to be open and brave and stuff.”

Whether it’s becoming a parent or an older sibling, the experience is often cited as inciting a previously elusive emotional clarity, or as one of the most powerful and common triggers for growth.

“I realised listening to it,” Skinner continues, “that once I’d finished the song, I was kind of singing to myself, in a way. Singing the stuff that I would have wanted to hear as a child. And I realised that I was trying to become the person that I would have wanted at that age for her. And that was really kind of sad for me to realise that I wanted someone like myself at that age, but also like empowering for me to feel like I’ve been through all of this stuff. I think she’ll go through a lot of things that I went through, just as a natural part of growing up and and if our roles were reversed, I think having someone like me in my life who could have guided her, or just made her feel less alone, would have been so wonderful. I’m really excited to hopefully be that for her. I’m just excited to get to know her.”

I think about my friend a lot as I speak with Skinner. I think about my friend a lot as I write and prepare to file this article. Which isn’t surprising: I’m conducting this interview because of them. Some of my questions come straight from them. But the real reason is the idea of change and growth and its universality, as much as we try to resist it, consciously or subconsciously. I draw parallels between Skinner’s growth being triggered through embracing collaboration and becoming an older sibling, and my interviewing Skinner in the first place being triggered by my friend. How something I’d not have considered a year ago due to my own closed-mindedness is now granting me a new perspective, all because I let someone into my life.

Skinner specifically refers to his family members, but there’s such a simple profundity to examining your identity through the lens of anyone important in your life. Relatability doesn’t automatically make for good art, but I can’t help but think about my own 2025 when I think about Running With Scissors and accordingly feel moved. I ask Skinner a lot of direct questions across our 70-minute conversation, but ultimately, I think I ask just two. One’s a little too personal for this piece, but the other is “Am I a Cavetown fan now?” The answer to both questions is the same:

“Yes. I think so.”