Will Linley

Cape Town, a viola, and a lockdown's worth of songs

Nobody in Linley's family played professionally, but music was constant in the house. His mother sang at the kitchen table and taught him nursery rhymes; he worked through string orchestras as a child, starting on violin and switching to viola at fourteen. Ed Sheeran's '+' pushed him towards the piano, and one of his brothers taught him the basics. None of that looked like a career: he enrolled to read BCom International Business and left his instruments behind at home.

The Covid lockdown reversed the order of things. He set himself the discipline of writing a track a day, posted the results to Soundcloud, and through mutual friends reached the producer David Balshaw, who told him to start putting snippets on TikTok. He kept posting demos until one of them caught. 'miss me (when you're gone)' came out as an official release in November 2021, and two other early tracks — 'wrong time', written in a pandemic Zoom session, and 'i don't wanna be yours', his first proper collaboration with Balshaw — followed out of the same stretch.

Interviewed in 2022, aged twenty, he was unbothered about positioning: 'I'm a colourful individual, and I smile, why try and be anything else?' That has stayed roughly true of the records, which have never attempted to sound harder or cooler than they are.

EPs, streams and other people's stages

The debut EP 'kill all my feelings' arrived in July 2022, and 'Magic' followed in 2023. By the time the album landed, 'miss me (when you're gone)' had passed 27 million streams and 'Last Call', from the 'Magic' EP, had passed 34 million, with the catalogue clearing 100 million overall. Those are respectable rather than freakish numbers, and they were built almost entirely without radio outside South Africa.

The live apprenticeship ran in parallel. The 2024 Magic Tour sold out its American rooms; there were festival sets at Lollapalooza, Barn On The Farm and Rocking The Daisies, and a support run with OneRepublic. A show at the Mercury Lounge in New York on 25 October 2023 gives a fair measure of that period — a basement with fans queuing early, a set weighted towards material that was not out yet, an acoustic 'Dancing Queen' with the room taking over, and an hour afterwards spent meeting everyone who had stayed. 'It's so special to look at people in the eyes, to interact with people and have chats with people,' he said of it at the time.

Don't Cry Because It's Over

The full-length debut came out on 5 September 2025 through Island Records: twelve tracks, recorded in Los Angeles, executive produced by Balshaw and Bubele Booi as The Imports, with writing and production contributions from Mickey Brantolini, Jackson and Colin Foote and Alex Borel. It is a concept record split into two chapters, following one relationship from the first spark through to the nostalgia that outlasts it.

The framing was deliberately cinematic. The videos interconnect, with the actress Zoe Oedekerk recurring as the love interest and Eliot Lee directing, and Linley has been open about taking his structural cues from rom-coms — 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' and 'About Time' both come up. 'Cinematic' marks the spark, 'First Love' the break; 'American Dream', 'Up At Night', 'The Last Thing I Do' and 'Good Guy' fill out the arc. 'You only release your first album once,' he said of the decision to commit to a single narrative rather than collect singles.

He toured it as the Hopeless Romantic Tour through South Africa, the UK and Europe over the autumn of 2025 — his first run headlining rooms on three continents behind material the audience already knew.

2026: a swerve, then a second EP

The most interesting thing Linley did this year was step outside his own subject matter. 'I Loved, I Lost', released on 26 June 2026, is a piano song written at home about mortality rather than romance. 'I felt like I had already written so many songs around the idea of love, but I wanted to journey more into being reflective about the life that I was living,' he said. 'I think the idea of being forgotten one day when we die is something that has always been an anxiety of mine, and this song is a true representation of those feelings.' It is the first time the catalogue has had something in it that is not addressed to a person.

Two more singles followed, 'Head First' and 'Think Twice', alongside 'Holding The Line', which was placed in the Prime original series 'Off Campus' and did a useful amount of work introducing him to an audience that had not come via TikTok.

Those three gathered into 'could this be forever?', a five-track EP released on 30 October 2026 — yesterday, in other words, and from the middle of a tour bus rather than from a promotional campaign. 'Life Of The Party' and 'What If It Happens' complete it. Five tracks, released a year after a twelve-track concept album, reads less like a holding pattern than a deliberate reset: shorter, looser, less tied to a storyline.

Forty-five minutes, nine or ten songs

The current job is opening for MICO on the North American leg of the Running From A Feeling Tour. The run has already taken in the Ogden Theatre in Denver on 2 October, Midway Music Hall in Edmonton on 6 October, White Oak Music Hall in Houston on 24 October, Brooklyn Bowl Nashville on 26 October, the Masquerade in Atlanta on 27 October and the 9:30 Club in Washington on 29 October, and continues through Music Hall of Williamsburg on 31 October, Boston on 2 November, Fête Music Hall in Providence on 3 November, MTELUS in Montreal on 5 November and two nights at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 6 and 7 November. His slot at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles was listed as 8.00pm to 8.45pm, which is about the shape of it.

Logged setlists from the run come in at nine or ten songs — ten in Denver, nine in Edmonton, where 'Cinematic', 'kill all my feelings' and 'Nothing but love' all appeared. The Atlanta night has four songs recorded so far: 'Cinematic', 'Life of the Party', 'Gracie' and 'Think twice'. Across 37 logged shows his most-played songs are 'Last Call' (23), 'Gracie' (22) and 'miss me (when you're gone)' (21), and ABBA, One Direction and Taylor Swift covers have all turned up at various points.

A student review of the San Francisco date at the Regency Ballroom describes the approach fairly: material drawn across the singles, the EPs and the album, jokes and chat between songs, a conversation with someone in the crowd dressed as Spider-Man, 'Last Call' as the closer, and the whole room barking on request to bring MICO on. It is a support set played as a support set — warming a crowd that did not buy tickets for him, and sending it to the headliner in better condition.

What is on sale

Seven dates are currently available. Three are the remaining MICO supports: Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn on 31 October, Boston on 2 November and Providence on 3 November. The other four are his own headline shows, set for April 2027 — the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles on 1 April, the Gramercy Theatre in New York on 8 April, the Atlantis in Washington on 10 April and Vinyl at Center Stage in Atlanta on 12 April. They are small rooms, a clear step up from the Mercury Lounge basement and a clear step down from the theatres he is opening in this autumn, which is a reasonable description of where he currently sits.