Tommy Barlow

Singer, producer and songwriter Tommy Barlow is a distinctive new voice in UK music. While he playfully describes his sound as “farm grunge”, his work feels unmistakably contemporary – a kind of digital, half-lit world-building coalescing with the traditional folk music he grew up with in a musical family just outside Cambridge.

Now signed to Young – home to the likes of Sampha, The xx, Isaiah Hull, Robyn, John Maus, Mechatok and John Glacier – Tommy today releases ‘Earth Killer’, his debut single for the label. Written, recorded and self-produced in the aftermath of a relationship breakdown, the track was made in a few cathartic hours on a laptop with Logic in a makeshift home studio: a mattress pushed against the bedroom door of the Turnpike Lane house he shared with six other musicians.

Accompanied by a Josh Renaut & Cuan Roche-directed music video, ‘Earth Killer’ invites listeners into a bruised but luminous world: a part-defiant, part-regretful slow-burn torch song that feels both intimate and slightly unmoored – a glimpse of an artist whose music blurs memory, place and feeling. Watch here.

Meanwhile, having recently toured with By Storm (formerly Injury Reserve) and Chanel Beads, and following a performance at Salford’s Sounds From Th