Tom Skinner

The career of drummer and composer Tom Skinner has been as unpredictable as it has been rewarding. At least at present, he is best known for co-founding two very different bands. He was one of two drummers in Sons of Kemet, the ecstatically militant quartet that turned the fight against British colonial oppression into a brass-band party. And he remains one-third of The Smile, a trio with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood that adds rock ’n’ roll muscle and edge to the arcing songs and ruptured experiments of the Radiohead mainstays. But Skinner has also made sensuous and smart electronic music as Hello Skinny, made crucial contributions to records by Beth Orton and Alabaster DePlume, and played an essential role in London’s rich creative jazz scene.

That versatility and collaboration are central to Skinner’s own band, a quintet that finds an unexpected space between busy post-bop and blissful acoustic trance. Skinner debuted as a bandleader on 2022’s Voices of Bishara, a loose-limbed album inspired by Abdul Wadud’s rapturous cello album By Myself. Though Skinner split 2025’s Kaleidoscopic Visions into two halves, the first sans vocals and the second with, it is a brilliantly realized and cohesive album, written largely on guitar but rendered by a high-caliber quintet of cello, bass, woodwinds, and reeds. On pieces like “Margaret Anne,” named for his mother, Skinner contemplates memory by playing with melody and meter, Reich-like pulses pulling against his advancing drums. And on “The Maxim,” 10 minutes of woozy dub abstraction alongside longtime hero Meshell Ndegeocello, Skinner seems to navigate the slipstream of the past, to splash around in its waters while playing his way toward an unpredictable future.