After a brief pause in the whirlwind of his early career, Thomas Headon returns with a new EP, determined to find balance — and ready to fight for it. Read our latest Hype cover feature.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: shotbymelissaa.
This year, Thomas Headon logged off. For the first time in the five years he’s been putting out music, he put the phone down and found a new perspective. “I deleted Instagram and TikTok and everything for probably a month. Coming back, I was like, what is a Brat Summer?” says Thomas in his first catch-up with Dork in over a year. Strikingly, he doesn’t seem to have changed much. He’s still the same giddy kid we’ve always been met with, but the music he’s putting out and the stories he’s telling suggest he’s a very different person. (And if you needed any indication he’s changed, he recently regretted a tattoo of a loaf of bread on his arm before he’d even left the chair. That’s growth.)
At the start of 2024, Thomas was putting together his debut album, long-awaited in his career so far in EP jail. He even managed to get the first single, ‘Middle of the Night’, out in February before the record he had planned quickly became irrelevant.
“I don’t know if the label will tell me off for saying that we were working towards an album, but then I went through a breakup, and it was like,” (he mimics an explosion) “and then I was like, this is so pointless. I completely fell out of love with music and being online. I literally just wanted to be around my friends and do that all the time and exist without having to be an artist.”
“I completely fell out of love with music and being online”
thomas headon
A large part of Thomas’ breakthrough happened online during the pandemic, quickly building a fanbase by consistently live streaming and sharing countless Instagram stories; that habit didn’t die when he could leave the house again and eventually, there was no differentiation between his professional life and personal life. Having moved halfway across the world from Sydney to London at 18, it’s a miracle he hasn’t gone completely insane sooner, but getting immersed in making music and creating an online community ended up being a blessing and a curse.
“When I’ve gone home to Australia in the past, I’ve been like, it’s Christmas, I’ll slow down, then I still do three stories on my Instagram a day, and I’m on Tiktok live every 10 minutes. Chill out, man, it’s okay, breathe. The breakup was a good way to do that; everyone was super supportive. There’s a lot of pressure to do [social media]. You know, I love my whole team massively, but it’s so easy for all of us not to realise how dangerous it is. This was all of us going like, whoa, let’s calm down. As shitty as it was, I think it’s completely changed the way I look at things now, my relationship to music and how I want to make it, and how I want to present myself, and all these things. To put it simply, I’m getting older.”
This shift in mindset has, obviously, drastically changed his approach to songwriting. The wackiness present in a lot of Thomas’ previous releases is dialled right down; a total 180 considering last time we spoke, fun was the mission. It’s rare that he brings a serious topic to the studio, and hasn’t really since 2022’s ‘Victoria’, a track that grappled with the untimely death of a close friend, but the opportunity presented itself again for his new EP ‘wasn’t a fighting kid’. Not usually the type to use songwriting to process complex emotions, it’s something Thomas found himself doing a lot during this recording process.
“The coolest thing about this EP is for the first time in ages, I’ve had something I really wanted to say, and I felt like I had to say for me, which is really nice. It’s fucking awful, but it was nice once I got it off my chest. No hate to every other song I’ve released, but so many of them are, like my song ‘2009 Toyota’; it’s just bullshit, man. It’s literally just bullshit. And there is beauty in that and it’s fun to write songs like that sometimes, but I think, for this EP, there’s none of that at all. I did the whole thing with my best friend, who I’ve done so much stuff with before, so I think that was really a comfort thing. He heard everything the whole time, so then when it came to making the music, he was like, well, no, that’s not how you actually feel.”
“For the first time in ages, I’ve had something I really wanted to say”
thomas headon
Working only with his friend, roommate and longtime collaborator Stephen Barnes on the project gave him plenty of room for honesty, and it shows. It was created with a real urgency – in four weeks of 10am to 10pm studio shifts almost daily – following a European escape that helped Thomas clear his head. “The moment I got back to London, it kind of fell out of me,” he says.
There’s a weight to the EP’s first offering, ‘Panic!’, that we haven’t seen from Thomas before. Written a few years ago with no place for it, the track was unearthed when he found himself in a rut at the start of the year. Sonically, it’s stripped right back, too, written mostly on an acoustic guitar, which usually ended up in the final recordings. There’s maturation in how comfortable he is sharing the more vulnerable parts of his life, and in his decision to comment on the wider world, using the thread of a toxic social media culture to tie the two together.
“There’s a song called ‘Hero’; it’s the only song on the EP that isn’t written from my perspective. The election is coming up in the States; people’s opinions online are just insanity. I feel like it is a volatile time where – I sound like a preacher now, but – you say one thing that someone might not agree with, and it’s like, well, you should kill yourself. That’s ridiculous. I think it speaks to a lot of insanity, which is fascinating. The whole EP is an arc, you know, it is quite a journey from the beginning to the end, and the end song is very much where I am now, which is great.”
“I don’t want to go full Chappell Roan, but I don’t want to talk about my personal life online, and I shouldn’t have to”
thomas headon
Now in a place where he’s reevaluating his relationships, it’s clear he’s focused on valuing the people he has around him in real life and being cautious not to share every experience online (“The other day, me and Stephen went go karting. Fucking sick, man. Anyway, doing shit like that is amazing, because every time I’ve done shit like that in the past, I’ve thought this would be a great story, and it’s like fuck that,” he says as a recent example). Setting a clear boundary between Thomas Headon the Person and Thomas Headon the Pop Star has been the crucial step into his next era.
“I don’t want to go full Chappell Roan, but I don’t want to talk about my personal life online, and I shouldn’t have to because I make music. I don’t want to be online the same way I was when I was nineteen because that’s just so bad for me, so bad for my friends, so bad for my family, bad for my relationships, all these things; it just doesn’t work. I’ve really understood now that I just make music and I don’t owe anyone live streams, and I don’t owe people replies, the way I interact with an audience has drastically changed. It’s been a sudden, literal cut-off point where I just stopped all this, and for me, that was really healthy. And I think, without sounding like a dick, that’s all that matters.”
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