Alternative Rock
Cavetown, ‘Running With Scissors’ | The Album Story
Nov
Cavetown guides us through the making of his new album, ‘Running With Scissors’ – out January 16 via Futures Music Group – and the quietly radical growth that shaped it.
Read Cavetown, ‘Running With Scissors’ | The Album Story below:
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Some people like to believe they have their life totally figured out, but the truth is that we’re all just drafts of ourselves. Evolving each and every day, learning as the pages turn, there is not one person on Earth who knows themselves fully. The best we can do is strive to understand ourselves better, to find clarity and meaning in life, whatever that may look like for each of us.
For Robin Skinner, there is somewhat of a magic in the ongoing rewrite of our lives. Since he first began writing music within the sanctuary of a Cambridge bedroom, that spirit of growth and self-reflection has defined everything he has created as Cavetown.
Because of that, every song of Robin’s has always served as a mirror. A reflection of his personal journey – through love, loss, identity and family – he has documented every facet of his story in song, but never quite so starkly as he has on ‘Running With Scissors’. Looking himself squarely in the eye, trusting in his feelings, and learning to love the person he has become, on album six Robin is stepping outside his comfort zone more than ever before.
“It really spawns from having a long-term relationship for the first time,” he reflects.
“Every album is like a journal about what I’m navigating at that point in my life, and this is the first time I’ve let myself love someone. I’ve been learning a lot about myself through her eyes and through her wisdom. She’s a lot smarter than me, and she has encouraged me to trust myself and to look deeper into my feelings and where they come from. Through loving her and combining my life with hers, I’ve learned a lot about myself.”
Written on the other side of a two-year healing process that has brought love, a move to New York, and the arrival of his baby sibling, with ‘Running With Scissors’ Cavetown frames growth less as a glossy transformation into something superior, but as a gradual process filled with unpredictable peaks and valleys.
Embracing life’s ups and downs whilst finding new courage in tenderness and vulnerability, Rock Sound sat down with Robin to unpack the quiet courage of his latest era.
THE SOUND
There’s rarely ever a grand plan when it comes to Cavetown.
As a musician who is constantly writing, every album that Robin creates tends to come together naturally, each made up of songs that capture a specific era of his life. The personality of a record only revealing itself to him once the process is well underway, as the songs that would come to populate the tracklisting of ‘Running With Scissors’ took shape, Robin noticed that a few things had unconsciously made their way to the front of his creative mind.
“Lately, I’ve been appreciating hyper-pop production, and I’ve also had a renaissance with my emo phase,” he nods.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of Pierce The Veil, and I realised that I wanted to be back in my little emo phase. I wanted to make loud music. I wanted to make music that made people run around in circles and go crazy. Now, I have the tools to know how to make that sound work. I wanted to push myself to the edge of harshness but also retain the warmth of the music I’ve been making over the years.”
Whilst the soft warm hum of his indie-pop beginnings still shines through on the likes of vibrant opener ‘Skip’ and the dreamlike luscious textures of ‘Baby Spoon’, there are plenty of curveballs pitched out on ‘Running With Scissors’.
It’s impossible to listen to the way ‘Tarmac’ blossoms throughout its runtime without hearing its post-hardcore influence, nor can you ignore the mathy licks that bind ‘Sailboat’, the short sharp burst of energy that is ‘First Time’, or the 8-bit glitches speckled throughout ‘Rainbow Gal’.
Putting the confidence he’d gained from self-producing recent releases ‘Worm Food’ and ‘Little Vices’ to good use, this time the door was wide open for Robin to push his creative vision as far as possible.
“With these songs, I wanted to play with the balance of harshness and letting the instruments speak for themselves. I leant into the contrast of loudness and silence,” Robin explains.
“I won’t pigeonhole myself with a song. If I feel like it’s supposed to sound a certain way, it doesn’t matter if it seems completely different from other songs on the album. There’s a throughline through all of my music that I don’t necessarily even hear, but I have to trust that it’s there in everything, no matter how soft or loud it is. I love it when you play the start of a song, then skip to the middle and think, ‘how is this the same song?’. I have to trust that my sound is its own thing, and that it will come through regardless of what influences I lean on.”
THE LYRICS
Following a period of change that saw him find love, move across the world, and welcome the arrival of a baby sibling twenty-five years his junior, Robin has had a hell of a lot to reflect on coming into ‘Running With Scissors’. Experiencing a whole host of big life events in quick succession, it’s been a time largely filled with positivity from a personal perspective for the 26-year-old, but it’s taken place against the backdrop of a world descending into madness.
“The world has provided plenty of new things for me to be angry about, and for my community to be angry about. Anger is a hard emotion to feel, and a hard emotion to draw something good out of, but I think it’s more about marrying the feelings of love and anger,” he contemplates.
“I feel like anger can come out of extreme love for something. When you care about something a lot, whether that’s yourself, your community, or the world… you inevitably feel anger when those things are impacted negatively.”
“I spent a long time in a state of somewhat depression. I didn’t care about myself, and I didn’t really care about what happened to the world. There was a helplessness to it. Now though, I’ve realised that I love myself, I love the people around me, and I love the world. All of that is being challenged right now, and I feel angry because I love these things.”
That well-placed anger surges through the two-minute glitched-out fireball ‘Cryptid’ and the frustrated screams cutting through the outro of ‘Straight Through My Head (DO IT!!!)’. A fury frequently directed towards a society set on othering trans people, often refusing their existence entirely, it’s a passion that is clearly drawn from love. Love for his community, love for himself, and love for a world that has been tarnished by hate and animosity.
Whilst there are countless songs about love to be found throughout his catalogue, Robin is approaching the subject with a wholly different mindset now. Currently in the first long-term relationship of his life, cherishing the warmth, safety and unconditional support that comes with that, songs like ‘Baby Spoon’ and ‘Rainbow Gal’ serve as windows into his newfound perception of love in all its messy and beautiful forms.
“Honestly, it’s just fun to sing about now,” he shrugs.
“In the past, I’ve felt like I’ve loved people, but they’ve sometimes made me feel a certain way, or they gave me this conflicting feeling about myself, or I simply didn’t believe them. There’s always been a ‘but’ to it. This time, there isn’t a but, I just love her.”
THE TITLE
As children, there are some warnings we hear repeatedly from the adults tasked with our care. You should look both ways before crossing a road, you should never rock back and forth on your chair, and you certainly shouldn’t run with scissors. Simple lessons on safety that stick with us well into our adulthood, that’s precisely where the album gets its name from.
With a sound that contrasts the sharpness of a blade’s edge with the sparkle of that same blade catching the light, and a cover that depicts the blurred chaos of running with a sharp object against the brightness of a blue sky, every aspect of ‘Running With Scissors’ is bound by that simple title.
“It became a metaphor for being afraid to take risks, and for not trusting yourself to stay safe,” Robin explains.
“There’s a song on the album called ‘Running With Scissors’, and that came before I’d named the album. Sometimes when I’m naming a record, I’ll look for a title or a specific phrase in a song that represents what it’s all about.”
“That song is about how I’ve been learning about my family through my partner. Especially since my sibling was born, I’ve realised that my parents don’t know what they’re doing. Often, they don’t even understand how to run with scissors safely. I have great parents, but they still make mistakes all the time. They slip up in ways that I see as them falling over with the scissors.”
“Metaphorically speaking, it’s less about not running with scissors, and more about teaching yourself to run safely. It’s about learning how to fall in the right way, or how to patch yourself up if you do stab yourself with the scissors. This stuff happens, and I spent a long time living in fear of it happening, rather than learning how to take care of myself when it does. The key to releasing that anxiety is in trusting myself.”
THE COLLABORATORS
In the past, collaboration hasn’t been something Robin has leaned on heavily. Whilst the odd session may have welcomed some fresh voices into the mix, he’s largely been comfortable alone, often too overprotective of his ideas to let anyone else get their hands on them.
Having tasked himself with everything from production to mixing and mastering in the past, it’s taken a long time for him to feel comfortable enough to open up the world of Cavetown to other creatives, but with ‘Running With Scissors’ it felt like the right time to take that leap.
“I learned a lot from working with other producers on this album, and that helped me to not stifle myself sonically,” Robin explains.
“I was particularly happy to have found a mixer who I trust so much [Allie Cuve]. She used to drum for me, so she gets the music. We realised after we mixed everything that we didn’t exchange a single reference. I sent her something, and she knew that I wanted it to sound exactly the same when she returned it to me, just more sparkly and balanced.”
“In the past, I’ve had a couple sessions where within the first couple of minutes you just know it’s not going to work. I want to walk into a room and feel like the person sees me, and that they’re on the same wavelength as me. I was surprised by how understood I felt by the producers I worked with this time.”
With ‘Reaper’ coming to life in his first session with David Pramik in LA, and ‘Rainbow Gal’ also written and produced during their collaboration, trust was essential when it came to the people Robin chose to involve in the process.
Working only with songwriters and producers who he could be himself in a room with, who supported his artistic vision and also aligned with his political views, every person who has touched ‘Running With Scissors’ has left their own subtle mark on it.
Take for example Orla Gartland, whose talent shines on the effervescent ‘Tarmac’.
“I originally tried to write that song with Orla for ‘Worm Food’. We had a session together when I was in Cambridge, and I loved what we made. Then, I just forgot about it!” Robin laughs.
“I remembered it as I was putting songs together for this album, and I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about it. I found it, and two years after we had started, I invited Orla back to finish it. She’s a great guitar player, and she has a beautiful voice too. During that session together we bounced back and forth between us.”
“After that, I did a lot by myself and sent her stuff remotely. I remember coming up with the idea for the big wall of sound at the end. I usually come up with ideas like that after I’ve finished in the studio, and I recorded a voice memo when I was half asleep to capture that idea. The next day I had to go to the studio and try to make sense of what I had said. It felt like a crazy idea, maybe too much, but that’s the point of this whole album. I wanted to hear myself out, and luckily, it sounded sick.”
The wonderful Chloe Moriondo – who Cavetown fans will certainly be familiar with after her appearance on 2022 track ‘Grey Space’ – also played an integral role in creating ‘Sailboat’.
“Chloe is just my friend, and I love working with them because we always have so much fun,” Robin smiles.
“We’ve had a couple sessions together at my place since I moved to New York, and the pressure is so low because we’re just hanging out. We always show each other demos, and I love the way that she responds to them, dancing in their chair and having fun. Chloe is a ball of energy, and of course she has amazing vocals. Every time I mix her vocals, I have no idea what to do because they’re already perfect.”
“We also had Underscores in the room with us as we were writing ‘Sailboat’, and she’s a hyper-pop icon. I’ve looked up to her sonically for a while, and it was really exciting to learn from her and see her workflow. A lot of the most iconic sonic touches in that song come from Underscores, so it was a great combination of minds there.”
THE FUTURE
If one thing’s for certain, it’s that right now, Robin is more confident in himself than ever before. Confident in the art he’s creating with Cavetown and his skills as a musician and producer, but also in himself and his ability to trust his instincts and emotions. No stranger to the power that music has to enable us to uncover new truths about ourselves, he’s coming into this new era with a fresh perspective on his place in the world.
“I’ve learned more about myself in writing this album than I have with most of my other ones,” he nods.
“Music is always a way for me to process things that I don’t understand. Often after writing it down, I still don’t understand it, but at least I’ve processed those feelings. This time though, it’s helped me to understand myself more, to understand my emotions and where I sit in the world.”
Aided by the trust established with his collaborators and the candid conversations that took place between them, there’s no denying that ‘Running With Scissors’ has played a role in healing a part of Robin, but soon these songs will no longer belong to him.
When it comes to Cavetown, Robin is well aware of how rare it is to have grown up alongside his fans in the way that he has. Navigating the trials and tribulations of life together and finding solace in their shared experience, he’s not the kind of artist who distances himself from how his art resonates with other people.
With a new chapter beginning in 2026 then, what does he hope people take away from ‘Running With Scissors’?
“I want these sounds to make your hair stand on end and evoke a physical response of excitement,” Robin smiles.
“It’s an invitation to let yourself feel angry, but to feel empowered by your anger rather than restricted. Obviously, there’s political anger here, but I also hold a lot of anger towards myself. I’ve avoided it for a long time, but the only way to accept truths about yourself is to allow yourself to feel the feelings. You have to realise that they are never one dimensional, and that you can feel multiple things at the same time.”
“You can feel angry towards yourself, you can feel disappointed towards yourself, but you can also feel compassion for yourself. One doesn’t have to leave the picture for the other to exist. That’s what I’ve been navigating with this album, and I hope that finds people in whatever way they’re searching for.”
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