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
