The sudden and steady rise of Malcolm Todd

It’s a rainy day in London — typical — and I’m meeting America’s most wholesome new rock star — self-proclaimed — in the basement of St. JOHN Marylebone. Todd tells me he’s been keeping himself on a tight leash for tour these days, taking care of himself the way an athlete would to make it through long stretches on the road. As the general public seems to have become acutely aware of, thanks to Taylor Swift’s well-publicised pre-tour routine, going out for months at a time and playing shows every night does take a similar toll on your body to running around a court or a field. Musicianship is as much stamina as it is fun and games. Todd seems to be coming to terms with that — and taking it seriously.

“I’ve had the worst diet ever of all time for the first 21 years of my life,” he laughs. To be honest, fair enough. “[This time] I was so disciplined. And I feel a lot better. For me, it’s like, I’m not just the bass player. I have to be ready for the show and put on a good show. So a lot of energy is put towards just making sure I’m rested enough and in a place to put on the show."

In conversation, Todd has the playfulness of his music and his online persona in spades: a cool but sweet LA kid who’s now making it big. At the same time, you can also tell he’s entirely dialled into his sound and is pushing forward. On his rise, he’s committed himself to telling a genuine and moving coming of age story that recalls the scrappiness and greatness of the golden era of bedroom-pop: icons like Omar Apollo, Dominic Fike, Steve Lacy, and Ryan Beatty. Coming of age and being honest about oneself seems something that, in the media, has been coded as feminine or 'quirky' but Todd is writing a new script, one where growing into your boyhood can be as cool as it is earnest.

“I just wanted it to fit in the nature of coming of age and being a boy and feeling very raw,” Todd tells me. The cover of his self-titled debut album, for example, is a striking shot of him wrestling with his producer and friend Jonah Cochran outside on a grassy lawn. Todd is mid air, laughing as he looks like he’s about to take down his partner. It’s a powerful visual mission statement for his music: young, connected, grounded, and free. “We just tried to get a candid shot of two guys, kids, wrestling," he explains. "It’s boyish, because it felt like I was telling a little bit of a story of just my family and growing up. It was my first time not just writing songs about breaking up with someone. It felt a little bit autobiographical, so I wanted to capture that.”

Todd’s start is now infamous. Though he grew up in a creative household — his sister is Audrey Hobert, another one of 2025’s breakout stars, and he was involved in choir and the arts at his high school — he had barely made any of his own music until his teens. At 16, he got a bass for Christmas and learned that quickly. Shortly thereafter, in his sophomore year, school shut during the pandemic. Locked up at home, he decided to teach himself guitar and in junior year, he started on Garage Band and began linking up with his now-close collaborator and friend Charlie Ziman.

"In senior year, we would just go make a song together in between choir practice and school ending. We made my first EP in two months. We just sat there, made six songs, and put them out,” Todd says. The short runway to that kind of ramp-up is indicative of two key qualities in the 22-year-old Todd: sheer natural talent and a relentless love for the craft.

The circumstances of his creative union with Ziman are also something of a pattern that’s repeated itself over the course of his career. His other closest collaborators — including Cochran and his sister Audrey — are all also his closest friends. He brought his cousin from Pennsylvania on to help manage him. That latter decision, he explains, has been transformative. There aren’t many people he would trust to spend all day every day with, but his cousin is one of them, as are most of the people he chooses to work with. It’s all, as they say, in the family: “I don’t want to be trying to directly compare myself to Entourage, but there’s definitely a lot of my close friends that work with me. My whole band are my best friends. I met them all in high school and just playing music in L.A. I don’t know, you just hang out with people and you grow to love them and you keep them around,” he explains.

In just a few years, Todd levelled up from novice to the big leagues, but that didn’t really scare him. “I’ve always thought that everything that I truly put my mind to I felt pretty confident in myself [to do],” he tells me. “When I put my mind to something, it means I care about it, and if I care about it, I just feel very passionate, and it all leads towards confidence and success. It just starts from loving it, and then I feel my love will take me wherever I need to go.”

His first stop was a gap year. School wasn’t really Todd's thing, and he was often dismissed as a write-off because of less-than-stellar grades. And yet, in those same years, he was also grinding out scripts for plays, directing, picking up instruments, and more. Those things don’t show up on a report card: “You’d look and I’d have Cs, and it was like, ‘Oh, well, he’s lazy,’" he explains. "But, it’s like, no, I’m not, I just don’t like school, and I like music.”

It took a bit of jostling to convince his mom, who was determined to make sure he didn’t use the time away from the classroom to slack off. The deal was that if she let Todd take his gap year, they wouldn’t be paying for it and so he ended up scooping ice cream while simultaneously working on his artist project. From there, things took off quickly, and college never came – a record contract with Columbia did instead. His first mixtape on the label, Sweet Boy, came out in 2024, home to the blockbuster track of the same name, and his official debut record, Malcolm Todd, followed in early 2025, launching him even higher. Tens of millions of streams came, along with massive tours criss crossing the world and festival slots at dream shows including Camp Flog Gnaw.

If there was ever a real turning point — so much of it has just been a rush of exponential growth — it was probably the debut. “This one was like the album. So, I had a little bit more of that pressure that I built up myself, just wanting it to be a debut album and feel like a thing, a statement of sorts,” he says. “It felt good to let it out. And I just made the album that I wanted to make.”

Believing in yourself seems like a cliche. But then you meet someone like Malcolm Todd who makes you fall in love with the romance of it again. The way he talks about creating and going for it is like a type of fuel. It’s clear he’s obsessed with what he does and is only ever getting more so.

“It’s for the love of the game, you know? At the end of the day, that’s what makes music special,” Todd explains. “What makes music important to people is that it is important to the person singing it.”

Part of what Todd has mastered is stardom in the Internet era. His social media presence is perhaps almost as famous as his songs, mainly just for the fun of it. When I ask Todd if there’s any strategy behind it, I’m surprised to hear that he was almost reluctant to dive in at first. “It’s a slippery slope, man,” he says of the apps. TikTok, he says, was a strange pill to swallow at first. It’s a weird thing having to balance being a musician with being a content creator. But if you know the world you want to build, as Todd does, it’s relatively easy to translate that into whatever format you have to. Posting often and early, he said, would give him the freedom to be more tasteful and take his time with the records if he played his cards right. “If [a song] becomes a ten-second clip and it’s that ten-second clip over and over again for TikTok, like, sure, it’s a bit tacky. But at the end of the day, if you go to the song and listen to it, I’m so proud to show you that song. So if that ten-second clip that might get annoying to people got you there, then I’m glad that it happened,” he says. “And, I love being on my stories and just fucking around. I love making funny jokes and I appreciate the art of instagram. It can be very genius to me,” he says with a smile.

Maybe that’s the most essential ingredient of the Malcolm Todd universe, giving oneself that permission to actually just fuck around and see what comes of it. It’s that cool lightheartedness balanced with serious conviction that makes his art so enticing. It’s a playful boyishness that’s addictively fun but also deeply earnest at heart. Listening to his music and entering his world feels like one big, comforting exhale.

When I subsequently ask Todd if he’s felt like the ballooning audience can be a lot at times, I’m also surprised by the response. “Every job just has things that are a little weird about it. Some of this is just part of my job, and it’s fine,” he tells me. “It’s not like the 90s where everyone’s on MTV and you’re just immediately world famous. I’m not like Justin Bieber walking out and I can’t get to my car. It’s just like, I go to Erewhon and people are like ‘Can I have a picture? I love your music!’ and I’m just like ‘Hell yeah!’ It’s not overwhelming in that sense. It’s a gift.”

Even in that gratitude, there’s still a certain integrity to Todd’s work that he has to protect. He moved to New York, for example, to get a little bit of that freewheeling twentysomething experience he missed out on by not going to college. For him, it was just being around kids his own age that he was missing. It’s also been staying on top of his mental game, grounding himself where he can. Everyone, he says, could be that little bit better at singing or writing or producing. But to chase after those marginal gains means nothing if you forget why you even started. You can hear the “why” in the music, and if you lose sight of it, people will know.

Whenever he’s not on the road — though some people can haul a mic from city to city and produce things out on the fly, Todd says he’s not one of them — he’s in the studio. “The studio is really important. The guitar I’m playing is really important. I want to feel connected. Having the right people in the room, or no one in the room. There’s a lot of variables. You just want it to feel natural. I’m just trying to give myself the necessary time to let what’s supposed to come out of me come out. It doesn’t just shoot right out. You have to sit there and sit in it and be stuck to find it.”

Getting bigger has given him the leverage to actually take that room. But whether it’s a record or a show or a shoot, the consistent theme is that Todd only wants to put out his best. “You just want to be making the music for yourself and trusting that that’s what they’ll love.”