Cavetown

A Cambridge bedroom and an upload button

Robin Daniel Skinner was born in Oxford on 15 December 1998 and raised in Cambridge, in a household where music was the family trade: his father, David Skinner, is a musicologist and choir director who taught him acoustic guitar at eight; his mother is a professional Baroque flautist and music educator. The formal apprenticeship did not take in the obvious direction. Skinner started a YouTube channel in November 2012 and posted his first original song, "Haunted Lullaby", in October 2013, while simultaneously putting records on Bandcamp from the age of fourteen — beginning with Everything Is Made of Clouds, followed by Gd Vibes in 2014 and Nervous Friends // Pt. 1 and Everything Is Made of Stars in 2015.

The Cavetown name settled around a debut single, "This Is Home", in August 2015, and a self-titled album that November. The second album, 16/04/16, arrived in August 2016 and was dedicated to a childhood friend, Jack Graham, who died of leukaemia on that date; 60 per cent of its proceeds went to Cancer Research UK. The method throughout was the same one that defined the genre he became shorthand for: one person, one room, ukulele and guitar, everything produced from scratch.

Lemon Boy, Sire, and a decade of being somebody's safe song

Lemon Boy, released in January 2018, is the record that turned a YouTube following into a career, followed that June by the EP Dear. Skinner signed to Sire Records in 2019 and put out the mixtape Animal Kingdom that April, with Sidney Gish, Simi and Chloe Moriondo among the guests. The major-label album Sleepyhead landed on 27 March 2020, into the first weeks of lockdown — timing that suited music already built for solitary listening. "Smoke Signals", with Tessa Violet, followed in July 2020, and the EP Man's Best Friend in June 2021.

Skinner came out as transgender in September 2020. He uses he/him and they/them pronouns, identifies as aromantic and asexual, and has ADHD. The fifth album, Worm Food, arrived in November 2022 with Pierce The Veil and Beabadoobee on it, alongside the launch of the This Is Home Project supporting LGBT+ youth charities. Then a quieter stretch: the EP Little Vice in February 2024, a cover of Mitski's "My Love Mine All Mine" that June, and "magic 8 ball" with Frankie Cosmos. By then several songs had been certified platinum or gold by the RIAA, among them "Devil Town", "This Is Home", "Lemon Boy", "Boys Will Be Bugs" and "Juliet" — a catalogue of small, quiet songs doing very large numbers.

Running with Scissors: the first record he did not make alone

Running with Scissors came out on 16 January 2026 via Futures Music Group, a joint venture between Neon Gold and Avenue A Records. Thirteen songs, 34 minutes and 11 seconds, and the first Cavetown album made with collaborators in a professional recording studio. Skinner has been direct about how uncomfortable that was. "I've always made everything by myself in my room, produced everything from scratch," he told The Line of Best Fit in an interview published on 7 January 2026, describing the hours before his first co-writing session: "I was just lying on the floor of my Airbnb crying, I have no ideas." A vocal melody worked out minutes before he left for the studio became "Reaper".

Sonically it pushes away from acoustic bedroom pop towards hyperpop production, heavier guitars and pop-punk edges, with the dream-pop register still underneath. The subject matter is the gap between youth and adulthood: anxiety, self-talk, Skinner's experience as a trans man, a romantic relationship, and the arrival of a baby sister, Micah, which reframed the whole record around becoming the protective older presence he had wanted himself. "Straight Through My Head" takes on negative self-talk directly.

The rollout ran through "Baby Spoon" in August 2025, "Rainbow Gal" in September, "Tarmac" on 10 October 2025 — co-written with Orla Gartland, and according to Skinner the oldest song on the album, about overwhelm and intrusive thoughts — "NPC" in November, and "Sailboat" with Chloe Moriondo in January 2026. The album's own lead single, "Cryptid", arrived with a short film casting trans people, Black communities, immigrants and disabled people as the misunderstood other. "In allowing myself to love, I've also allowed myself to feel anger about things I would usually ignore," Skinner said of it. "I hope this feels empowering for people to sing back."

Reviews largely went with it. Clash gave it 8/10, praising the lyrics and vocals; Dork gave four stars; Record Collector singled out the honesty of the writing. Kerrang! took the opposite view, arguing the stylistic departure had not been pushed far enough and calling some of it sleepy. It reached No. 94 on the UK Albums Chart, No. 4 on UK Independent Albums, No. 10 on UK Album Sales and No. 19 in Scotland.

Standing, autumn 2026

The touring year has been the biggest of Skinner's career. The Running With Scissors run opened on 1 February 2026 in Singapore, took in New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe through the spring — Laneway Festival at Western Springs Stadium in Auckland on 5 February, Dublin's Academy on 7 and 8 March, Barrowland Ballroom on 10 March, two nights at London's Electric Ballroom on 19 and 20 March, Poppodium 013 in Tilburg on 4 April — before the North American leg.

That leg is a 21-date headline run from 21 September to 25 October 2026, opening in Allentown, Pennsylvania and finishing at Brooklyn Paramount, with Chloe Moriondo in support throughout. It is mid-flight as of early October, with the Wiltern in Los Angeles on 8 October, Phoenix on the 9th, then Dallas, Austin, St Petersburg, Orlando, Atlanta, Boston, Silver Spring and Philadelphia before the Brooklyn close. As of April 2026 Skinner had 4.6 million monthly Spotify listeners and a YouTube channel of 2.26 million subscribers. He now lives in New York.

The show as it is now

The staging is deliberately modest for rooms of this size: a raised circular platform at centre stage, an unusual mic stand, straightforward lighting and a lo-fi woodland look pulled from the record's artwork. Reviewing the sold-out Project House show in Leeds on 17 March 2026, The Gryphon described Skinner in a cropped white shirt with a sticker-covered butter-yellow guitar, and noted how much the voice has dropped over ten years of records. Dreamer Isioma opened that leg; the North American shows belong to Chloe Moriondo, who also walks back on during Cavetown's set.

The shape is consistent. At The Salt Shed in Chicago on 27 September the main set ran 19 songs, opening with "Skip" and "Cryptid" and moving through "Sweet Tooth", "Rainbow Gal" and "Tarmac" before "Big Strong Man", "Micah" and the title track; Moriondo returned for "grey space" and "Sailboat"; "Boys Will Be Bugs" closed the set and a two-song encore of "Straight Through My Head (DO IT!!!)" and "Devil Town" closed the night. Festival sets are compressed versions of the same thing — 40 minutes and 12 songs at Laneway Auckland, with a Pierce The Veil cover in place of the mid-set album run.

What reviewers keep returning to is the room rather than the production. The Gryphon's account of Leeds dwelt on how protective and well-behaved the crowd was, and on a decade-old reputation for the shows functioning as somewhere difference is the default. The new material is where the risk sits live: hyperpop textures and hardcore vocal passages sit next to songs written by a teenager with a ukulele, and the 2015 tracks are still what the encore is built from.