MICO

Caledon, a Discord server and a Twitch stream

Jose Miguel Veloso was born in Toronto on 6 December 2002 into a Filipino-Canadian family, and finished school at Mayfield Secondary in Caledon, a commuter town north-west of the city. He started putting music online as a teenager, and the audience that gathered around it did so in places record labels were not looking — Discord servers and Twitch streams, where he was a daily presence long before any radio programmer had heard the name. The online-first route is not a footnote to the MICO story; it is the mechanism by which everything since has happened, and it is still visible in the way the shows are run.

He has worked outside his own catalogue too. Credited as Miguel Veloso, he sings the role of Telemachus in Epic: The Musical, the sung-through Odyssey adaptation that built its own following through social platforms rather than a theatre run — a close parallel to how his solo material travelled.

Four EPs, and a breakout about cutting his hair

The releases came steadily and independently, through his own Wasted Years imprint. 21st century heartbreak arrived on 30 July 2020, when he was 17. second thoughts followed on 30 June 2022. Internet hometown hero landed on 25 October 2024 and was reissued with extra tracks as Internet hometown hero (+DLC) on 2 May 2025. The title of that EP does the work of a biography: a hometown hero whose hometown was a server.

The commercial turn came with "cut my hair", released on 21 November 2022, which reached number 29 on Canada's rock radio chart — the first point at which the project registered outside the platforms that had built it. On record his frame of reference is Canadian and Australian pop-punk lineage, Marianas Trench and 5 Seconds of Summer among the names he cites, filtered through indie pop and alternative rock.

Touring scaled in step. The Fantasy Tour ran in 2023, the Cancel Your Plans Tour in 2024, and the Internet Hometown Hero World Tour across 2024 and 2025, by which point he was also opening for Nightly. He played Lollapalooza Berlin in July 2025. In August 2025 he signed to Columbia Records, which is where the debut album eventually came from.

A debut album he refused to rush

When the lights turn on was released on 26 June 2026 through Columbia: ten tracks, 28 minutes. Speaking on the day of release, Veloso was blunt about the delay, saying he "wouldn't do an album until I was super ready and sure about it", and that the record came from working out what his current writing had in common rather than extending the EPs. He described the approach as "laying it all out, really, as bare as I can".

The specifics bear that out. "Shoes" began as journal entries. "Your favorite flowers" is about a friendship that went wrong and then repaired itself. The lead single "DREAMBOY" sits on the gap between being looked at and being understood — a reasonable preoccupation for someone whose career was conducted in front of a webcam. He traces the sound to 2000s pop-punk and the film soundtracks of that period, which he calls "hidden gems and forgotten songs", with The Police and Michael Jackson further back.

The album is not stylistically tidy, and does not try to be: pop-punk on "Do it all again", washed-out synth textures on "Open up your eyes", hyperpop on "DREAMBOY", straight piano balladry on "Learning to love". It peaked at number 29 on the US Billboard Top Album Sales chart and number 23 on the Vinyl Albums chart. A deluxe edition later expanded it to fifteen tracks, and a new single, "Everything's the same", arrived on 18 September 2026.

Where things stand, October 2026

He was nominated for Breakthrough Artist or Group of the Year at the 2026 Juno Awards. The summer brought the sort of bookings that follow a label debut rather than precede it: FIFA Fan Festival sets in Vancouver and Toronto in July 2026, then Osheaga in Montreal in August. The workload is documented plainly in the touring record — 14 shows in 2024, 68 in 2025 and 42 in 2026.

The Running From A Feeling Tour was announced on 28 May 2026, with a Vancouver date at the Vogue Theatre added the same day and general sales opening on 29 May. It began in Philadelphia in September and has worked west and back east since, through the House of Blues in Chicago, the Showbox in Seattle and the Masquerade in Atlanta. This week it reaches the 9:30 Club in Washington on 29 October and Webster Hall in New York on 30 October, with the Music Hall of Williamsburg on 31 October, Paradise Rock Club in Boston on 2 November, Fête Music Hall in Providence on 3 November and MTELUS in Montreal on 5 November. Two nights at Toronto's Danforth Music Hall on 6 and 7 November serve as the hometown run. Asia and Australia follow — Singapore on 19 November, Manila on 21 November — before the tour finishes in Melbourne on 29 November.

He is not waiting for that to end before selling the next one. On 10 October 2026 he announced the In:Between Tour, 29 dates billed as his largest headline run to date, opening in Barcelona on 18 January 2027 and closing in Cleveland on 13 March. Europe takes up the first three weeks — Paris, Cologne, Munich, Prague, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Antwerp — with the British and Irish dates at Manchester Academy on 1 February, Glasgow's QMU on 2 February, the Roundhouse in London on 4 February and Dublin's Academy on 7 February. Presales began on 13 October and general sale on 16 October.

Stillville, every night

The current show is built as a piece of theatre rather than a run of songs. The setting is a fictional town called Stillville, specifically its Main Street, and the story advances between numbers: a side screen carries propaganda-style radio bulletins and town signage, a mailman walks on to deliver a letter, and a segment stages a blind date using two people pulled from the crowd. It is a lot of apparatus for a club stage, and it mostly holds together, though a review of the sold-out House of Blues show in Chicago on 29 September complained that the character warning everyone to get out of Stillville never pays off — the narrative sets up an escape it does not deliver.

Musically it is a band show. Veloso sings and plays guitar alongside Jason Khater on guitar, Raffaele on bass and Matt Olliver on drums. That Chicago set ran the whole of When the lights turn on, five tracks from Internet hometown hero, "cut my hair", the new single, and sombr's "Back to Friends" as a surprise cover; across 27 documented shows on the tour, sixteen songs have appeared every single night, so the shape is fixed and the variation sits in one or two slots. The audience brings its own business — cut-out flowers held up during "Your favorite flowers", and, in Chicago, a sustained chant while empty cups were stacked on someone in a banana costume. The same reviewer called it their favourite MICO show to date.