A violin at four, a jazz course dropped, and a SoundCloud start

Tom Misch started on the violin at the age of four and took up the guitar later. He studied music technology at Langley Park School for Boys, and in 2014 enrolled in a jazz guitar course at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich. He lasted only six months before leaving to concentrate on his own music. That choice, to trust the songs he was already making rather than the course he had joined, shaped everything that followed.

By then he had already begun. Born on 25 June 1995, the English musician and producer started releasing songs on SoundCloud in 2012, a way of finding listeners that needed no label and no audition. His discography has since grown to include albums, extended plays, mixtapes, singles as lead and as featured artist, guest appearances and remixes.

His debut studio album, Geography, arrived in 2018, and it included “It Runs Through Me”, a collaboration with De La Soul. Two years later he turned back toward jazz in a different way, teaming up with the English drummer Yussef Dayes for What Kinda Music. It was distributed through Blue Note Records and Caroline and was nominated for the Best Album Ivor Novello Award in 2021.

His third album, Happy Music, appeared in 2023 in what is billed as a collaboration with his alter ego, Supershy, and in 2026 he released a fourth album, Full Circle. The path is unusual: a guitarist who walked away from a jazz course went on to release music through one of the best-known jazz labels, and a young producer with a SoundCloud page ended up making records with a drummer and a hip-hop trio.