Cover Designer: Kurabu Soda
Words: Olly Kay
kid apollo are entering a new phase of their career. The South London trio, based in New Cross, have been making waves with their thoughtful blend of alternative and indie, underpinned by lo-fi textures and drawing comparisons to the likes of Fred again.. and Bon Iver. Now, with their debut full-length mixtape arriving and having completed their first-ever headline show, the group are building serious momentum around their creative world.
For our digital cover, Dance Wax sits down with Theo, Felix and Jimmy to discuss the closeness of their brotherhood, how their shared emotional experiences shape their music, and how this bond translates into the sonic and visual world of kid apollo.
The group are suitably excited right now. As we sit down over Zoom, they have just finished taking shots for the Dance Wax digital cover and the mixtape launch is just over a week away.
“We’ve been looking at this moment as like a reintroduction of us into the world,” Jimmy tells me. Their previous release, EP said who (2025), marked a step forward for kid apollo, with a stream of singles from the upcoming release, including ‘kumbaya’, ‘i let the sun back in’ and ‘ups/downs’, building towards this latest moment.
And it’s not just new music that fans have to look forward to. “We’re doing our headline show at the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington,” says Jimmy. Theo was initially nervous. “At first, you don’t know if you’re able to sell tickets or not.” Then the show sold out in under 24 hours.
Despite the growing attention around the group, they emphasise the importance of appreciating how far they’ve come while continuing to build steadily. As Felix and Jimmy explain, “Everything feels like the groundwork right now. We haven’t stopped working to make people see the vision or the music.” They see this moment, the mixtape launch and first headline show, as making a statement. A ‘flag in the ground’, if you will.
“And in terms of what we want this project to do, it’s to be an opener for us, to make a statement and just get people really excited,” says Felix.
The trio’s approach is refreshing. Twins Theo and Felix, alongside their childhood friend Jimmy, are essentially three brothers. “We’re literally just all siblings,” says Felix.
That means the occasional domestic disagreement is part and parcel of the arrangement. “Theo’s pissed off at Jimmy because he hasn’t done the dishes,” Felix laughs, before describing the deeper moments when they have to come together to work through something. “We’re super close, a step ahead of friends.”
Even outside the house, they’re rarely far apart, regularly playing five-a-side football together. “Footy Addicts is a dark place. However we’ve got, like, a few group chats that we hop around. Our main one is in Crystal Palace.”
“Because we live together and know everything about each other, like, oh, he’s going through this situation, or we’re going through that, everyone feels the same thing in our house.”
Living together certainly shapes their friendship, but more importantly the music, too. This shared understanding forms the foundation of how their music develops, whether through the instrumentals or the vocals. Across i let the sun back in, kid apollo move between acoustic, folk-leaning moments and more dance-oriented tracks, drawing on a broad palette without losing the emotional thread that connects them.
“When we go to make music, Theo will start to make a beat, and it’ll be the same feeling as what Jimmy will want to write about. It’s an unspoken thing.”
“There’s lots of genre-bending stuff. It doesn’t really matter how we get to that feeling, as long as we get there.”
But it hasn’t always been easy for the trio. As the mixtape title i let the sun back in would suggest, there have been darker times to navigate. Similarly, the confessional track ‘ups/downs’ shows that getting through these periods is rarely a neatly linear process.
“It was a darker time in my life, in all our lives in some sense,” says Jimmy. “It’s never a perfectly smooth journey out of it, and then we were on the other side looking back, reflecting with a lot more clarity and peace. The songs were made along those different steps, which is why the energies of them change quite a lot.”
Rather than following a carefully mapped emotional arc, i let the sun back in captures the trio at different points in that process. Its shifting energies reflect the reality of working through a difficult period: feeling better one day doesn’t necessarily mean the darker moments have disappeared for good.
This approach also explains why the group refer to the project as a mixtape rather than an album. There was no prescribed direction of travel or overarching concept, but a collection of songs that captured different points in their lives. “It’s a reflection on a period of time type of project, and I don’t think that all projects are like that,” says Jimmy. “Some albums, you’ll sit down at the start of it, and you decide collectively where you want to go, whereas this was much more a mirror to a period of time.”
The trio’s creative approach extends to their visual world, too. They have always taken their visuals seriously and are keen to remain involved in every aspect of their creative direction. However, according to Theo, it originally came more from a place of necessity.
“When we started releasing music like four years ago, we didn’t have a budget to get a director or team of visual artists in, so we just literally did it ourselves. Then over the years we’ve just gotten better at it and found our little pocket of aesthetic. Since the start we haven’t even considered getting someone to do it for us.”
Now, having established themselves in this role alongside their music, they relish the opportunity to develop all aspects of their creative world. Take the video for ‘easier’, a painstakingly hand-animated stop-motion production. “As soon as we finish a song we’re thinking about ideas straight away. If you know what you want, no one should really be able to do it better than you can.”
It’s refreshing to see a group take such an active approach to every aspect of their creativity. But Jimmy tells me kid apollo won’t be sitting back to marvel at their success just yet. “We’re about to go back into hibernation and writing mode. It’s gonna feel good to really sink our teeth back into actually making music and feeling that again.”
For kid apollo, then, this feels less like a moment to sit back and celebrate than another step in a longer process. With i let the sun back in, they’ve captured a period of their lives in all its shifting moods, translating the experiences they share at home into something that extends far beyond it.
Their music and visuals might move between different sounds and styles, but the thread running through it all is the same: three friends who understand one another well enough to build something that encapsulates them equally and honestly. Living together means they’re rarely removed from what the others are experiencing, whether that’s working through a difficult period or simply navigating the everyday ‘ups/downs’ of life. Those shared experiences become part of the music, often without the need for much explanation.
kid apollo might see this mixtape as groundwork, but there’s already a world taking shape. And with the trio heading back into hibernation, it feels like we’ve only just been introduced.
Listen to i let the sun back in below.