Artemas

Oxfordshire, a Cobain documentary and a laptop

Artemas Diamandis was born on 23 September 1999 and grew up in a village in Oxfordshire, with Greek Cypriot family on his father's side. He began piano lessons at six and was educated at Radley College. The turn towards writing his own material came at 16, after watching Montage of Heck, the Brett Morgen documentary about Kurt Cobain. He taught himself instruments and production from there and worked through several styles before anything settled. A rock track he recorded at 17 picked up local radio play, and he later moved to London.

The release history starts quietly. His first single, "High 4 U", arrived in November 2020, and a debut mixtape, I'm Sorry I'm Like This, followed on 6 May 2022. Throughout that stretch he wrote, produced and mixed on his own, which he still does — a point he returns to in interviews when the conversation drifts towards how the hits happened.

The first chart entry came with "If U Think I'm Pretty", released on 24 October 2023, which reached No. 39 on the UK singles chart after circulating on TikTok. It established the template: a short, synth-heavy track with a hook designed to survive being clipped to fifteen seconds.

The song that went everywhere

"I Like the Way You Kiss Me" was released independently on 19 March 2024. It runs at 152 beats per minute, built on eighties synth tones and a dark, retro-futurist arrangement; Diamandis co-wrote it with Jesse Fink, Kevin White and Daintree, and produced it with White and Daintree. By the end of April 2024 it had accumulated close to 2.5 billion TikTok views and had topped Spotify's Daily Top Songs Global chart.

The chart record is unusually broad for a self-released track. It peaked at No. 3 on the UK singles chart on 25 April 2024 and No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 27 April 2024, while reaching No. 1 in Austria, Flanders, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland, and topping Billboard's Global Excluding US chart and the Global 200. Certifications followed: Diamond in France, five-times platinum in Australia, three-times platinum in the United States and double platinum in the UK, Austria, Canada, New Zealand and Portugal. Reported global streams passed 1.7 billion.

Two further mixtapes landed inside that year — Pretty on 9 February 2024 and Yustyna on 11 July 2024 — and the live business scaled with the song. By the end of 2024 he had sold out 75 headline dates and shifted more than 50,000 tickets. In January 2025 he announced 24 shows across South America, Mexico and the United States, taking in his first festival appearances: Lollapalooza's South American dates in March, Coachella on 11 and 18 April, and Governors Ball in Queens on 7 June, with the run closing at First Avenue in Minneapolis on 20 June. The same month as that announcement, "I Like the Way You Kiss Me" was shortlisted for Song of the Year at the BRIT Awards 2025, held on 1 March, against the Beatles' "Now And Then", Charli xcx and Billie Eilish's "Guess" and Dua Lipa's "Training Season". He signed to 10K Projects.

Naming his own genre

LOVERCORE, his fourth mixtape, came out on 24 October 2025 with 14 tracks. The title is his own coinage for what he makes — dark synthpop about wanting and self-sabotage in roughly equal measure — and the record leans harder into that than anything before it. Reception split. Its Album of the Year user score sits at 67 from 195 ratings, with listeners praising the eighties synth architecture of "Superstar", "Vanish" and "Sweet Kim" while flagging lyrical repetition and uneven stretches across the back half.

A fifth mixtape, getting up to no good, arrived on 27 March 2026 and runs just over half an hour. Writing in the Oberlin Review on 3 April 2026, Chloe Ko read it as a sequence of moments from a toxic relationship rather than a narrative, describing it as "a perfectly-curated playlist for making bad decisions on a night out" and singling out "little black dress" for the shift into what she called cathartic belting — the first point at which the record's narrator refuses to be managed. The blend she identifies is R&B, synth-pop and grunge.

Diamandis has been direct about what the two projects are for. "It's daunting to create something that cohesive, but it excites me, too," he said around the LOVERCORE release. "I want to put my flag in the sand. I think I'm making some of the most exciting alt-pop music out there. And I do it all myself. I just haven't communicated that clearly enough yet."

Where he stands in October 2026

The touring year began with a single home show at the Roundhouse in London on 3 February 2026, then a North American LOVERCORE run from 20 February to 21 March that took in Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, Washington DC, Raleigh, St Petersburg and Miami Beach. Tickets had gone on general sale on 30 October 2025 and moved quickly.

With a second mixtape to carry, the touring was rebuilt around both records. The LOVERCORE / GETTING UP TO NO GOOD Tour went on general sale on 8 April 2026 and runs to 38 dates between September and December — his largest headline schedule, up from a 35-date global run in 2024. The North American leg comprised 14 mid-capacity shows, opening in Vancouver in September and working through the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio on 18 September, Stubb's Waller Creek Amphitheater in Austin on 19 September, The Bomb Factory in Dallas on 22 September, the Uptown Theater in Kansas City on 24 September, the Criterion in Oklahoma City on 26 September, the Fillmore Minneapolis on 29 September and The Rave in Milwaukee on 1 October, before Nashville on 8 October, Philadelphia's Franklin Music Hall on 10 October and a finale at Toad's Place in New Haven on 11 October. All North American dates were all-ages.

That leaves 19 dates on sale for the European and UK leg, which runs from 12 November to 14 December in noticeably bigger rooms: Palladium Köln on 15 November, Apolo in Barcelona on 18 November, Klub Progresja in Warsaw on 23 November, Docks in Hamburg on 25 November, Huxleys Neue Welt in Berlin on 26 November, Rockefeller in Oslo on 30 November, Store VEGA in Copenhagen on 1 December and La Madeleine in Brussels on 3 December, with Paris, Amsterdam and dates in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg and Sweden filling the gaps. Prague on 22 November and Warsaw on 23 November sold out, and demand in Berlin was enough to add a second Huxleys night on 6 December. The UK stretch closes the year at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange on 10 December, O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester on 12 December, O2 Academy Birmingham on 13 December and O2 Academy Brixton on 14 December.

On stage

The show has moved some distance from the laptop-and-haze sets of 2024. Reviewing the Auckland Powerstation date in April 2024, The 13th Floor described thick fog and a dimly lit stage for what it called an evening of dark R&B; Scenestr, covering the Australian dates that November, read the live work as evidence he could make the jump from TikTok ubiquity to something more durable. Across four logged critic reviews, the aggregated verdict is an entertaining performer with worthwhile shows.

The current run is band-led. Reviewing the North American finale at Toad's Place for The Concert Chronicles on 16 October 2026, Sierra Presti described bright, hard-cut lighting, guitar solos from Diamandis's guitarist Peter, and an opening slot filled twice over — his touring drummer, Andrei, DJ-ing laser-lit remixes as Jean Pierre La Croix with an Artemas plush strapped to his headphones, followed by Henry Morris with Dean on bass and Seamus on drums. Diamandis stopped the set when fans near the front became faint, having earlier joked that "drinking is only helping to enhance the performance", and spent the night riffing on the host city as "newly shaven". Andrei was due to step away from touring after the leg.