Running with Scissors Tour

© Jaxon Whittington

Cavetown’s Robin Skinner, of Cambridge, England, has become an anchor for a generation of listeners who’ve found not just solace in his music, but a kind of spiritual room to grow up in. His catalog, spanning lo?fi ditties and indie rock charmers, has amassed billions of streams, earned a 6× Platinum certification, and inspired high-profile features in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Billboard. His global touring career has taken him from sold?out clubs to massive tours with AJR and Pierce The Veil, as well as festival main stages at Glastonbury, Lollapalooza, Corona Capital, Primavera Sound, and many more. Along the way, his songs have become comfort objects to his dedicated fans, who have clasped them, cried to them, and grown up alongside them. They’ve been soft hands offering understanding when the world felt too sharp.

His new album, Running With Scissors, asks: What happens when you leave that room you grew up in and finally look yourself squarely in the eye? What are the gifts and curses you’ve inherited from the family who raised you? Which parts of them do you bring forward, and which do you cut away?

With all these lessons and questions in tow, Running With Scissors captures life at the moment you’re forced out of the classroom into the open world, scissors in hand, trying not to fall.

Written on the other side of an intensive two?year healing process, Running With Scissors finds Skinner aged up and galvanized. That bravery extends to the songwriting itself: the album is threaded with intergenerational tension, familial excavation, and an unflinching exploration of who Skinner wants to become as an adult. These questions were prompted by two major life events: falling in love with the person he wants to start a family with, and the birth of his first sibling, who is 26 years his junior.

Aged up and showing up as the best version of himself, Skinner hasn’t lost sight of the millions of listeners who have grown up alongside him. “I want them to enter this new era with me and not feel like it’s for kids. Because I’m not a kid anymore,” he says. “I want it to feel like we’re moving forward together.”