Since uploading his first songs to YouTube as a teenager in Cambridge, England, Robin Skinner has grown Cavetown into both a creative outlet and a source of connection for many listeners.
His tender, emotionally exact songwriting – spanning lo-fi confessionals and indie rock charmers – has amassed billions of streams and become a source of comfort for a generation of listeners, particularly those in the queer community, who’ve grown up alongside him.
This year, Cavetown will make his Australian festival debut at Laneway – and the set arrives at a pivotal moment in his career, where he will play material from his new album Running With Scissors, for the first time.
Written after a two-year period of personal healing, Running With Scissors finds Cavetown opening his creative world to collaborators for the first time, broadening his sonic palette while retaining the project’s intimacy.
It’s an album about growth, one that reflects his desire to move forward alongside the fans who’ve long found refuge in his songs. It captures the uneasy shift into adulthood, interrogating family, identity, and inheritance with a sharper, more expansive sound than ever before.
We caught up with Cavetown ahead of his Laneway debut.
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Rolling Stone AU/NZ: This is your first time playing Laneway, it’s your first Australian festival. How are you feeling, are you excited, nervous?
Cavetown: I mean, I’m definitely nervous, mainly because we’re going to be playing lots of songs from this new album for the first time for everyone who comes to Laneway. So it’s going to be an experiment for me. It’s going to be a chance to see if I can actually play all the stuff that I wrote. I definitely pushed myself to write very intricate parts. And while I have full faith in my band to pull those parts off, I am yet to know if I can do that. I haven’t even practised yet, so we’ll see.
But I’m excited. I think it’s going to be a really exciting set. I think it’s going to be really different. And I think there’s such a wonderful lineup this year as well. So I feel like there’s going to be a lot of different people who have great music tastes and hopefully people that I can pinch to also listen to my music.
Laneway has a really good blend of up-and-comers and more established names, you mentioned the lineup, is there anyone in particular you’re keen to see?
I’m very excited to see Chappell Roan. My poor, poor girlfriend cannot come, she’s in school learning and being smart. But she wishes so bad that she could come and see Chappell Roan. I’m really excited to see Alex G on the lineup, too. He’s an artist that I’ve looked up to for a long time. PinkPantheress, too, was a welcome surprise to see on there. Those are my main three that I’m excited to see.
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How do you approach festival set lists and the vibe of a festival show compared to a headline show?
They are definitely different. And I think it’s very hard to prepare for a festival show because I feel like, at least for me, the quality of my performance and the way I feel on stage is like 80% what the audience gives me. And I’m very fortunate to have an audience full of people who consistently are super emotive and super smiley and just make me feel great just to be on the stage. So at a headline, even if I’m having a terrible day, I can lean back on the fact that my audience will uplift me. And you can’t necessarily predict that for a festival because I might be playing a stage where literally no one knows who I am and I have to just win everyone over.
But I guess I’ve gotten to a point where there’s always some faces in the audience that even if I don’t literally recognise them from a different show, I can see a look in their eyes that they’re part of the Cavetown community. And so I always set my expectations very low before I go out just for myself, not for the audience. I’m like, ‘They’re all going to boo you, no one’s going to even look at you, everyone’s going to think you suck’, so then when I go out and I’m proven wrong that there are some sweet people who show up in Cavetown merch or have flags with them, it just reminds me that there are people who are happy to see me, which is nice.
But at the same time, there’s a little bit of pressure off in the sense that for these festival shows we’re playing a lot of new songs. So people might, especially if they don’t know the music at all, they might not necessarily know how the song is supposed to sound. Since we’re doing a lot of difficult new stuff, there’s room for error there and it might not necessarily get picked up on. And it’s a good practise for me and my band to just push through the little teething phase of learning new stuff. So I think it’s going to be a nice chance for us to practise the new material and also get a gauge on how the more general public feels about it too and take that forward into the headline sets and learn from that.
Although it’s your first festival, it’s not your first time in Australia – do you have any standout moments from your last trip, any fun stories to share?
I had a very fun beach day, I think in Melbourne. I dug a big hole and I sat in it. I went swimming in the ocean. I saw rays, like manta rays and a bunch of starfish. I’d never been snorkelling and I’d never seen a reef like that before. I remember coming home from that day and being like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even get sunburned, this was the best beach day of my life’.
Did you have a favourite show from that run?
I’m really terrible with remembering shows, it kind of all blurs together for me. I would literally have to look at photos. I’m just an anxious person on stage. I think sometimes I just kind of zone out and just do my job. And then after the fact, I’m like, ‘Wow, that was great’. But in the moment, it’s really hard to be present and form a memory.
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Now I want to talk about your new album that’s coming out, Running With Scissors. Tell me about that.
This whole album is really something I’m very, very proud about. Not just the songs in the album, but the whole process of it. I think I really pushed myself to be brave and try new things and welcome new people into my creative process. And I feel like that comes across in the music, it went through multiple brains before being in its final form. And even though some of them I’ve made entirely by myself, some of them, there’s a lot of little pieces and ideas in there that wouldn’t exist without some people that I collaborated with. I wouldn’t have pushed myself forward with an idea I already had, if it hadn’t been for someone in the room, telling me that it was like a good line of thinking to go down. I was really able to let my imagination just like go crazy with this album and let the songs kind of ebb and flow in different directions and take unexpected twists and turns.
But at the same time, still, each song is very sure about what it is and what it’s trying to say. And I feel like that’s a difficult line to balance. But I feel really proud that I about the way that I did balance it. I achieved what I set out to achieve. I don’t know how else to sell it, but I’m very excited people to just hear the creative risks that I’ve taken and the brave ways that I’ve taken my art up another level for this album.
The tracks so far have been incredible. “NPC” was the most recent single, how’s the reception been to that? How have your fans been reacting?
Yeah, it seems that people have been really loving it. People have been really surprised, I guess, by some of the sounds. I will say, sometimes, I get a little nervous about the reception of my music. Because the whole purpose of my music is really for me first and foremost to get something off of my chest or process something in a way that that is creative and fulfilling and makes me feel in control of the thing. And so often when I first released stuff, I just put it out there and let people react how they want. And I kind of let the world process it and soak it up before I really start processing the way that the world is soaking it up.
With this new stuff, I think there’s a lot to think about. There’s a lot of a lot of different messages, a lot of different feelings. So I haven’t been delving fully into the reception, but the stuff that my friends at least have been saying to me and my family and the people I love around me, they’ve been really, really excited about it. Their opinions mean a lot to me.
I think it’ll be difficult for me to connect the public opinion of the new music to real people until I’m able to play those songs in front of those people and like put faces to the words behind the screen. So yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited to really start to feel what the world feels about it in front of the audience at Laneway in Australia and stuff. But so far, my loved ones have been really sweet to me about it. And lots of really kind words from people that I work with whose music tastes I really hold at a high standard. And so for them to say that it’s some of my best work, it really means a lot to me.
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Your music has become deeply meaningful to queer communities; a lot of fans connect with it while figuring out who they are. I know that’s important to you as an artist as well. How has your own experience with identity shaped the stories you choose to tell and the music you choose to release?
It’s a thing that I am going through, whether I like it or not. And since music is something that helps me with the hardest things to think about, it naturally comes up in my music a lot. And that’s been therapeutic for me.
But an unexpected kind of side effect is the way it’s been able to show me that there’s other people that feel the same way. And it’s interesting, it kind of has the same effect both ways, the fact that I’m able to write a song about something, it has been able to touch my audience in a way where they’re like, ‘Oh, finally, someone understands’, or ‘this is an experience that I haven’t been able to put into words’. To be able to see that it has that effect on people does the exact same thing in return to me.
I wrote this because I didn’t think anyone understood so to see my community kind of rise up out of the distance in the whole world and come to my shows and look at me in a way where they’re like, ‘I understand’ is so cool. My processing of my identity, I think it’s going to be a constant thing that I’m realising, I’m always figuring out my identity. It’s never a thing that I figured out one time, and then the work is done. I think that I’m always going to be changing. And I’m always going to be re-meeting myself in different ways and I’m going to be losing myself and then finding myself again. That’s a common experience for anyone, especially for the queer community.
I touched on some new feelings in this new album, which I haven’t really been able to access before, around, you know, anger for my community, around the way that we were being treated in the world these days. But with an undertone of how that anger doesn’t exist without the love I have for my community and the love that I have for myself. I want to kind of give the listener a sense of strength in demanding your existence, and strength in the fact that a community can hold each other up, and we can all feel pissed off together, and that’s kind of the start of change. Even if situations can’t be changed, it feels good to know that you and your community are all feeling the same way, and that you all understand one another.
For more information about Laneway, see here.
LANEWAY FESTIVAL 2026
Thursday, February 5th (18+)
Western Springs, Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau NZ
Saturday, February 7th (16+)
Southport Sharks, Gold Coast/Yugambeh Jagun QLD
Sunday, February 8th (16+)
Centennial Park, Sydney/Gadigal & Bidjigal NSW
Friday, February 13th (16+)
Flemington Park, Melbourne/Wurundjeri Biik VIC
Saturday, February 14th (16+)
Adelaide Showgrounds, Adelaide/Kaurna Yerta SA
Sunday, February 15th (16+)
Arena Joondalup, Perth/Whadjuk Boodjar WA
