When Casey Lowery’s grandfather passed away in 2023, he left him a caravan – an old holiday home on the English coastline, which contained a history Casey hadn’t previously thought about. But when he arrived, moving in temporarily with his dog, removing himself from the metropolitan music industry he’d spent over half a decade trying to make sense of, it unlocked something within him. There, amongst the company of pensioners and nature, the final pieces of lekkerland, his debut album, came together. The album, Casey says, is his effort to “reconnect with my past a bit,” and a reflection on the kind of community once promised to him by a music industry system he’s trying, in a more modest, loving form, to reshape and make work for him. “Lekker” itself is an Afrikaans term Casey picked up on the road and means ‘something pleasing’. After years of recalibrating,Casey has found a way to make something that pleases himself as much as it pleases others. Casey was born in Chesterfield, a market town in the English midlands, an only child with a penchant for the spotlight. Growing up, he was exposed to the greats of early 00s English pop culture, like Gareth Gates and Robbie Williams – two men who set the mould for what he thought he wanted to be. His mother, keen for him to follow that musical path, signed him up to clarinet classes. He played for eight years, all while his musical taste became a little more refined, listening to pop-leaning indie bands, before eventually becoming an Arctic Monkeys boy. “But I can’t say it ever crossed my mind that I wanted to be a professional clarinettist,” Casey says. “I just wanted money.” Growing up in a working class town, singers, to Casey, were all rich and famous, and at the time that felt like a lifeline out of there. “There’s an element that I just wanted to be cool too, you know?” he says. “I’ve always wanted to do it.” So, like most kids at that time, he wrote songs for fun. “Trampoline” for example isa euphemistic, buoyant paean to romance, written at 14. Once released, the track became aa viral hit which drew attention of industry big hitters. Soon, he was moving to London and signing a record deal, working on early EPs that leaned into the poppy sound he was trying to grow out of. “I’d realised that this situation wasn’t for me,” he says, “and I was trying to go back to the music I liked more”. Then the pandemic hit, and the decision was made for him: Casey was dropped and moved back home to Chesterfield. His world was spinning, and he had to find a way to sort it. His TikTok videos were the first stepping stone for that. Casey’s covers – and later his diaristic, tongue-in-cheek songs, often made in reaction to chauvinistic men – picked up steam in a way a then-meandering Casey couldn’t have engineered. It was like something clicked: the existence of that audience of people who liked what he made were theoretically there, just behind a screen. Within a week of posting, he had 150,000 followers, and interactions with everyone from Doja Cat to Rihanna. Today, he has 3.2 million followers on TikTok alone. As soon as Covid restrictions lifted, Casey toured globally, releasing new songs, like the jibing, “We Had Everything…” and expanding his audience, which now stretches across the world, from European cities like Berlin all the way to South Africa. Since 2021 every tour of Casey’s,and there have been several,has sold out completely, all without him releasing new music since 2022. Casey’s debut album lekkerland is the product of two years spent figuring out how he wanted to make and release music. “I’ve been able to sit for two years and be able to write music that I actually like,” Casey says. “I found my people, finally, you know? And it’s changed everything.” That key person is Raffer, his producer who he’s worked with almost exclusively on lekkerland. The two grew so close that, after Casey’s grandad died, Raffer agreed to meet him at the caravan to put the finishing touches on the album. They made the entire record together. “He knows who I am,” Casey says, “and he’s been very loving and caring. I’ve never had that, especially from a producer before. To have a bit of care around who you are as a person while you’re in a creative environment makes such a difference.” After four back to back sold out world tours including the prestigious KOKO in London, Casey Lowe ry could be Chesterfields best kept secret. With over 5 million followers online the tongue in cheek songwriter has finally put pen to paper on an extended project with ‘Not Ready’ being the first track. The new single “Not Ready” was born from “the feeling of trying to process grief before it’s happened”. When his grandfather was unwell, Casey remembers heading to the hospital to say his goodbyes, only for his grandfather to recover unexpectedly. Raff (producer) and Casey worked on the song together; after which both of their grandfathers passed within three weeks of each other. “It’s the push and pull of wanting to be super close to this person and knowing how much it’s going to hurt you,” Casey says, “[about] working out where your heart lies and what it can take.” Written using his time in therapy as inspiration, “Caroline” leans into the cheeky side of Casey more explicitly and is a love song to his therapist. He calls it “self aware”; a reflection of the time spent in Africa practising the kind of mindfulness he maybe once felt he had to gawk at. Now, he understands the benefits, but is finding increasingly grounded ways to talk about it in his songs, saying the quiet part out loud like Casey tends to. “Blue Cords”, meanwhile is about the reality, of modern dating. So the story goes: Casey was on a date a little while ago, and as the girl went up to the bar to get them a drink (“It was her round,” Casey stresses, “we do things 50/50”), she saw him chatting to a guy, who she then started kissing. Before long, said guy sat at the table with them, and Casey became a spectator in a new date. So he wrote a song about it: not a takedown or a ‘woe is me’ weepy number, but a song that meets his date at a place of understanding, “It’s weird, at the talking stage you can do anything and that’s fine / But I don’t need to see,” he sings. Casey remembered thinking: “No hard feelings, but this isn’t for me.” “Blood Line” brings us back to the idea of family, about Casey’s adopted eight-year-old sister. Casey wanted to write something about “making sure she’s okay”. She had lived a whole life in such a short space of time. “I went through all this stuff that felt so crazy to me, and then she came along and her story was so profound compared to mine. It made him realise that “everyone has a fucking story”. Having been through the ringer already, there’s a sense that Casey is conscious to hold onto the people who support him and give back. He founded his own management company and makes the calls that feel right for him. He makes a conscious effort to keep his shows affordable, so all of his fans can come and whenhe travels to South Africa to tour, he brings on local crews to help support the local creative community. “I’ve got a really cool community that allows me to be more myself,” he says. “I think I’m one of the only people on the internet that has that. People just tell me to be myself.” From his grandad’s old caravan, Casey is constructing a distinctive, accessible world for himself and his fans. He’d cringe at the thought of being seen as some kind of altruistic prophet, but Casey’s intentions are good.