A Career Between Genres
New on Substack: a long-form reflection on aliases, audience expectation, genre identity, and the strange tension between creative curiosity and career momentum.
For most of my career, I’ve found myself operating somewhere between established lanes - never fully inside one scene, one sound, or one expectation. From Lunatic Calm through Elite Force, Zodiac Cartel, Simon Shackleton and beyond, the instinct has always been the same: follow whatever feels creatively alive at the time, even when that comes at the expense of clarity, momentum, or easy categorisation.
This new piece explores the hidden tension at the centre of that approach - the way audiences, algorithms and even success itself can quietly push artists towards repetition, while curiosity keeps pulling in the opposite direction.
It touches on:
the early days of Fused & Bruised
how Leave You Far Behind distorted perceptions of Lunatic Calm
why the first two Elite Force albums fragmented my audience
the rise of the Revamped era and peak touring years
why aliases often become creative escape routes
how streaming algorithms struggle with artists who refuse to stay in one lane
and why some of the most interesting music tends to exist somewhere in-between categories
This is probably one of the more personal pieces I’ve written so far, but I think it also speaks to something much broader happening in music culture right now.