Will Linley builds a world around love

A hopeless romantic in the truest sense, Linley doesn’t view scenes from iconic rom-coms like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days as simply comfort watches; they became the blueprint for his debut album.

The South African artist’s debut record, Don’t Cry Because It’s Over, doesn't play like a set of organized singles lined up for release, but rather as a 12-track continuous rom-com split into two chapters: the dizzying rush and tumultuous collapse of a first relationship, then the tentative joy of trying again. His earlier EPs were snapshots of young love, situationships, and all. This time, the songs fit together like scenes in a film. The videos follow the same logic, with the same actress returning as the love interest and the storyline unfolding into one connected love story, like a short film.

For an artist who made his initial debut with bittersweet tracks like “Miss Me When You’re Gone” and “Tough (The Girls Song)”, often described as “sad boy pop,” Linley grows from an underdog navigating early-twenties chaos into the role of the leading man, the boy-next-door unafraid of sincerity.

“You only release your first album once,” he tells me, almost reassuring himself to savour the moment. That urgency runs through the record: cinematic, hopelessly romantic, and committed to making space for big feelings unapologetically. Rather than just writing love songs, Linley pieces them together into one story.

For Linley, leaping from extended plays to an album wasn’t only about recording more music. His EPs, from Kill All My Feelings to Magic, were stitched together from singles, each one chasing a different moment of young love or heartbreak. They were “snapshots,” as he puts it, quick flashes of early crushes, breakups, situationships, the messy stuff of the late teens and early twenties. With the album, on the other hand, it gave Linley a chance to build artistically.

“With an EP, you’re really just releasing four singles and a bonus track,” he explained. “It’s about which songs can stand alone, which ones could be a hit.” An album, though, permitted him to write beyond singles culture in the age of trending TikTok audios and overnight sensations. He didn’t have to ask if a track could work on its own; instead, he thought about how it might live as track six, or how it might deepen the arc. That shift gave him what he calls “freedom to explore,” songs that might not have been obvious singles but made sense inside a bigger story. “There was a lot more fluidity and freedom in the music we explored and tried to create.”

At the centre of his music is the romantic human experience: the cycle of how we love, lose, and try again. Linley lights up talking about Matthew McConaughey “running through the traffic” in the classic How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: “That feeling and that emotion is so tangible… You just want to feel that thrill, that excitement, and joy.” For him, those cinematic moments aren’t a gimmick but a mirror of what he’s been writing all along. “A lot of the music that I make is very centred around love… I didn’t want this album to be a complete departure. So I was like, how do I lean in harder?”

Leaning in meant creating a world of the narrative and treating the record like a film. “For me, the album is like two chapters,” he says, the first tracing the rush and collapse of his very first relationship, the second finding the courage to love again. “This album really holds a lot of my most honest writing,” he admits, with “First Love” as the moment something “unlocked.” The visuals follow the same arc. “I wanted the music videos to tell a mini rom-com… link them all together,” he explains. So far, we’ve seen “Cinematic” (the spark) and “First Love” (the break-up), as well as “Up At Night”, featuring Zoe Oedekerk as Linley’s love interest and directed by Eliot Lee. Keeping continuity was key. “Now people have kind of seen the beginning and near the end, but we need to fill in some of the blanks. I didn’t want things to just stand by themselves.”

As a rising artist, winding up in LA writing rooms with producers you’ve never met is almost a rite of passage. It’s the industry conveyor belt, jammed with back-to-back sessions, each one hoping something sticks. For musicians still finding their feet, that roulette can be brutal, especially when the subject is heartbreak. Rehashing your worst memories in front of strangers you met five minutes ago is a particular kind of vulnerability.

“Going into random sessions makes me so anxious,” Linley admits. “At some point, the producer’s going to turn around and be like, ‘So what are we doing today?’ and you’re like, I don’t know any of you.’”

For Linley, the writing process wasn’t just about the songs; it was about who he was in the room with. “You’re freaking out because you don’t know what you’re ready to share.” This time, he stuck to familiar faces: David and Bubele Booi, Mickey Brantolini, Jackson and Colin Foote, Alex Borel. “With them I felt comfortable enough to actually be vulnerable and honest,” he says, the pressures to perform disappearing.

The safety net within the studio sessions opened the door for “First Love”, the single he credits as unlocking a new level of honesty. It came in the wake of his first breakup, which hit harder than he expected. “I thought my world was ending,” he says. “I just wanted the earth to swallow me up.” It’s the kind of apocalyptic feeling most people remember from their late teens or early twenties, when heartbreak feels final, even though it’s just the beginning.

The timing was almost cruel: his third EP, Magic, had just come out, a project full of wide-eyed, happy-go-lucky tracks that wore optimism openly. “I was singing, ‘you and me feel something like magic,’ but I was in the throes of heartbreak.” The idea for “First Love” lingered with him for months before he was ready to process it, eventually surfacing as one of the most pivotal songs on the record. “It was far more mature than anything I’d done before… it felt like a step forward, like a new chapter.”

Don’t Cry Because It’s Over is less about snapshots and more like a love letter, like he’s settled into what he values in relationships. You can hear it in tracks like “American Dream”, playful but grounded, or “The Last Thing I Do”, which carries a weight the 24-year-old had been striving to achieve. “American Dream” captures the playfulness of the album’s second act. “I had basically just fallen in love with someone from America, and I was finding it quite funny how, you know, she would say some things differently than the way I would… I wanted to write something that felt very fun and tongue-in-cheek, and on the experience of being a South African in love with an American girl.”

What comes through in conversation is how deliberately Linley leans into his hopeless romantic side, not just as a personality trait, but as a creative weapon, the thing that gives his songs their pull. We talk about About Time, one of his favourite films, and how stories like it have shaped not only his taste but his expectations. “To an extent,” he admits, movies do influence how he sees love. He chased fragments of that magic, “planning out some extravagant romantic date… watching the sunset on the cliffs in Cape Town,” only for his first relationship and reality to reset the fantasy. “I realised it’s not all sunshine and rainbows,” he says. “There are difficult parts, and that’s okay.”

It’s that balance between the swoony, rose-coloured-glasses highs and the reality check of actually being in a relationship that keeps Don’t Cry Because It’s Over from feeling like pure gloss. Even the humour in “Good Guy” leans into that. He admits he worried it might come off “kind of pick-me-ish,” but he wrote it from the underdog’s perspective on purpose: “I am a pale, lanky, ginger kid. Give me a try.” It frames him less as the brooding heartthrob and more as the boy-next-door, attentive and earnest.

As he reflects on his upbringing, the Cape Town native speaks with an unmistakable pride in being a South African musician. I ask him if he feels a pressure of responsibility to represent where he’s from. “I love my home, I love my country,” he says simply. “I love everything about it.” That pride radiates in the way he speaks about South Africa, not as a marketing angle or responsibility he feels forced to carry, but as something more natural, and more of a sense of belonging he wants to fold into his music wherever possible. “I don’t know if I feel a sense of responsibility,” he admits, “but I feel a massive sense of pride, like so much pride.”

It’s a notable stance for an artist breaking into global pop. South African musicians like Tyla and Black Coffee have cracked the international stage, but in the sphere Linley is moving into – glossy, heartfelt, radio-ready pop – the mainstream is still dominated by the US and UK. For Linley, growing up, that dominance wasn’t just visible; it shaped his sense of possibility. “I believed that pop music could only be made by American people or British people,” he reflects. “I didn’t think that as a South African you could do it.” To be releasing a debut album now, one that sits comfortably within today’s mainstream pop world, it feels to him like an achievement in itself because it proves to his younger self that he was wrong.

He lights up describing the creativity and potential of the South African music scene, but he’s frank about what still holds it back, and to him, he owes it to the infrastructure offered for emerging artists. “We need more venues,” he says. “There’s a lot of young artists doing awesome things in Cape Town and in Johannesburg, but the reality is there is no concert culture because there are no venues.” He compares it to the ladder artists can climb in London or New York, where intimate clubs and mid-sized theatres create a clear roadmap: in New York, Mercury Lounge to Bowery Ballroom to Webster Hall; or London’s Omeara to Lafayette to Shepherd’s Bush Empire pipeline. “In Cape Town, there’s no mid-sized venue, and so it makes it very hard for an artist to grow, and it makes it very hard for concert culture to be built.”

For Linley, that absence of venues shaped the kinds of shows he could play starting out as a teenager. “I played at wine farms and at festivals, where people are sitting on picnic blankets, drinking a glass of wine, and you’re just background music,” he recalls. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s very different from being in a sweaty club of 150 people, where the focus is to come and watch live music.” He also remembers driving out to Afrikaans festivals where his English-language songs didn’t quite fit. “I was the only English kid on the lineup,” he laughs. “People were not stoked with me being on stage. But it was fun, and you learn something there.” Those early experiences gave him resilience, the kind that’s carried him into international tours, but they also highlight his point, which is that without mid-size venues, it’s extremely difficult for an artist in Cape Town to leap from playing for friends and family to building a genuine local fanbase.

Listening to him describe the gap in South Africa, it’s hard not to think of London’s own grassroots venue crisis. Spaces like Moth Club or The Lexington act as stepping stones for emerging artists here, but rising rents and licensing restrictions mean more of them are closing each year. If infrastructure collapses, artists lose the spaces where they can test out material and build audiences, and without that initial foundation, acts struggle to sustain a music career.

The difference, of course, is scale. In London, the problem is scarcity, but in Cape Town, it’s near absence. Linley’s point is evident: careers are shaped by infrastructure. Behind every breakout artist is a pipeline of small rooms that offered space to grow, the same grassroots circuit that once hosted one of Linley’s key inspirations, Coldplay, at Camden’s Starfish (now known as The Laurel Tree). Without venues like that, he argues, a scene struggles to sustain a real concert culture, the kind that eventually produces headliners. “I think what I would love is just if there was a venue that opened up, that people could go to and watch their favourite artists, and that young artists could cut their teeth and play shows and learn the live space. That would be one of the coolest things.”

It’s not pressure he’s describing, but possibility. For Linley, representing South Africa isn’t about carrying its future on his back, but rather about being part of the music culture that already exists, and one that he hopes will keep expanding. “I strongly believe that there’s something incredibly inspiring happening in the South African music industry,” he says, “and I feel wonderfully humbled that I get to play a tiny part in what’s going on.” That humility feels consistent with everything else about his growth as a musician, the underdog romantic, the artist who still can’t quite believe his debut is finally out in the world.

For all of the careful planning that went into the album, Linley’s favourite part of the job is stepping on stage. I ask him how he balances the toll of touring. He notes how he’s aware that he is just getting started, but expresses his love for it. “I don’t find it hard at all. I think it’s the best thing ever. Sure, you can be tired, but there’s no better feeling than playing your shows and having people sing and dance. It just energises you straight away.” He talks about live shows with the same wide-eyed excitement as someone stepping on stage for the first time; the novelty of it hasn’t worn off, and maybe never will. This autumn, he will be embarking on The Hopeless Romantic Tour, hitting cities across South Africa, the UK, and Europe. Linley is already visualizing what the tracks will look like underneath a live setting and the puzzle of building a setlist, to treat the shows as an unfolding of chapters from the album.

Will Linley has always written about love, but Don’t Cry Because It’s Over gives it shape. It’s not just a record about heartbreak and healing, but about building a world around those feelings, the way relationships start fast, collapse suddenly, and leave you figuring out how to begin again.

That kind of sincerity can feel out of step with where saturated pop leans in 2025. So much of the landscape defaults to irony or detachment; Linley’s strength is that he doesn’t bother with either. He leans in fully, to the honeymoon stages, to the devastation, and to the tentative hope of moving forward. He’s not embarrassed by big emotions, and that willingness to sit inside them is what makes these songs resonate.

The record itself doesn’t shy away from the rush of first crushes or the devastation of breakups, but threads them into a narrative that feels both cinematic and deeply human. Grand gestures may frame the story, but it’s Linley’s unflinching sincerity that gives Don’t Cry Because It’s Over its weight. In leaning all the way in, he makes pop music’s most universal subject, love, feel human again.