Featherweight

Some music doesn’t ask anything of you—no emotional preparation, no willingness to be challenged—and still manages to leave something behind when it ends. Tom Misch makes that kind of music, and I’ve been returning to it for months without fully understanding why it keeps landing.

He’s twenty-two, based in South London, plays guitar and violin and produces everything himself. The releases on SoundCloud and Bandcamp—particularly Beat Tape 1, put out through his own Beyond the Groove imprint—sound like the best possible version of a gray afternoon: warm jazz chords, soft rhythms, melodies that arrive and dissolve without overstaying. "Feel-good music" is the easy label, and it’s accurate, but it undersells something. Underneath the warmth there’s a restraint, almost a kind of ache—the sensation of something pleasant moving past before you’ve had time to hold onto it.

Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Huw Stephens, and Jaden Smith have all been loud about him, which is an unlikely coalition, but it makes sense—his music doesn’t belong to any particular scene or time of day. He’s been playing small rooms and the crowds keep finding him. That’s usually how it goes with the real ones.