Cavetown, the moniker of UK-born artist Robin Skinner, has released his new album, Running With Scissors, out now via Futures Music Group. The record marks a defining moment in Skinner’s career: an emotionally expansive body of work that captures the disorienting threshold between youth and adulthood, braided together sonically through hyper-pop, heavy guitars, and his signature dream-pop sounds.
Released today alongside the album is the lead single and music video for “Cryptid,” a song and short film that explores Skinner’s experience as a transgender person at a moment when trans rights, safety, and even visibility are being threatened. In the video, “cryptids” live underground, hidden away by a world that fears and misunderstands them, until they finally emerge to challenge the narratives imposed upon them. While the video centers the trans experience and incorporates trans symbolism throughout, Skinner’s intention is broader: to hold up a mirror to how society has historically recast many communities, Black, queer, immigrant, disabled, and others, as “other. “In allowing myself to love,” Skinner says, “I’ve also allowed myself to feel anger about things I would usually ignore. I hope this feels empowering for people to sing back.”
In tandem with the album’s release, Cavetown has announced a limited run of Running With Scissors Tour headline shows in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn, bringing the album’s themes of growth, reckoning, and connection into intimate live settings. In partnership with PLUS1, $1 from every ticket sold will go to local organizations working to support and empower the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ communities, underscoring Cavetown’s continued commitment to advocacy and community care.
Written on the other side of an intensive two-year healing process, Running With Scissors is shaped by two profound life shifts: falling in love with the person Skinner wants to build a future with, and the birth of his first sibling, 26 years his junior, which prompted a deep reckoning with family history, masculinity and responsibility. Throughout the album, Skinner explores what it means to reparent yourself, to decide which parts of your upbringing you carry forward, and which you cut away in order to show up differently for the people you love.
The album opens with “Skip,” a buoyant love song Skinner calls “the first I’ve written with genuinely positive overtones,” capturing the childlike joy of loving from a place of safety. Its final chord flows directly into “Cryptid,” revealing love and anger as intertwined forces. Elsewhere, “Rainbow Gal” refracts intimacy through distance with shimmering 8-bit textures; “Baby Spoon” tenderly reimagines masculinity through care and softness; “NPC,” “Reaper,” and “Straight Through My Head (DO IT!!!)” confront dissociation, burnout, intrusive thoughts, and self-survival; while “No Bark, No Bite” and “Micah” grapple with family, inheritance, and the kind of man, and sibling, Skinner hopes to be.
Running With Scissors also marks a major creative milestone. For the first time in his career, Skinner invited collaborators into the core creative process, working closely with Chloe Moriondo, Underscores, Ryan Raines, David Pramik, and Couros, whose contributions expand Cavetown’s sonic universe.
The album closes with its title track, “Running With Scissors,” which distills the record’s central metaphor: adulthood as risk, imbalance, and forward motion. “Everyone’s running with scissors,” Skinner reflects. “There’s so much to be scared of, but there’s also so much fun to be had, and you’ll miss all of it if you don’t just wing it.”
Beyond the music, Cavetown continues to be a vital community builder. His long-running This Is Home Project, an LGBTQ+ youth initiative supporting housing, mental health services, creative programs, and crisis support, has raised over $700,000 for organizations serving queer young people. That same spirit of care, advocacy, and responsibility runs throughout Running With Scissors, underscoring Skinner’s evolution not just as an artist, but as a person deeply committed to the world he wants to help shape.
With Running With Scissors, Cavetown steps fully into adulthood without abandoning the millions of listeners who have grown up alongside him. “I don’t want this to feel like it’s for kids,” Skinner says. “Because I’m not a kid anymore. I want it to feel like we’re moving forward together.”
