In the spring of 2021, a high school senior in Tampa logged onto a Zoom call and found the executive vice president of Capitol Records waiting on the other end. "Next thing I know, I have the executive vice president of Capitol Records sitting on this Zoom and I'm like, 'Wait a second...this wasn't supposed to be real,'" Aidan Bissett has recalled. It was real. Five years later, that surreal Zoom call has produced a debut album, an arena-scale opening slot on LANY's 2026 Soft World Tour, and a streaming footprint north of 220 million plays, built almost entirely on the strength of two songs.
The Basement Show That Started It
Long before the label calls, Bissett was a kid who had just moved back to Tampa from Portland, dropped into an all-boys Catholic high school where the friend groups had already calcified, and found himself turning inward. He has repeatedly pointed to one specific night, a Wallows show in a hotel basement in front of maybe 75 to 100 people, one of the band's first ever gigs, as the moment he decided music was the only thing he wanted to do. That formative math shows up in how he describes his own sound: "guitar melodies like Wallows, tape delay like Dayglow, 808's like Verzache and Role Model, and synths from Coin and Tame Impala." It is a rare case of an artist naming his influences with the precision of a recipe card, and it explains why AllMusic settled on "hooky and stylishly youthful guitar-based indie pop" as shorthand for what he does.
A Catalog Built on Two Songs
The pandemic gave Bissett the isolation and the time to teach himself production and start posting to TikTok, where bassist Blu DeTiger found his early clips and connected him with a producer. "Without the help of other artists on TikTok I wouldn't be where I am today," he has said. The payoff arrived in September 2020 with "More Than Friends," a breezy end-of-summer single that TikTok turned into a phenomenon and that has since racked up roughly 97.2 million Spotify streams, still by far his biggest song. His second EP, I'm Alright If You're OK, produced with Captain Cuts and COIN's Chase Lawrence, added "Tripping Over Air" at roughly 55.2 million streams. Between them, those two tracks account for well over two-thirds of his entire streaming total.
Two songs carry a catalog that has never once touched a Billboard chart.
That gap is not an oversight in the reporting. It is a genuine feature of Bissett's profile: a monthly listener base hovering around 1.2 to 1.5 million, a Spotify "Pop Rising" nod, a Rolling Stone mention as a candidate for "Pop's Next Thing," and still no chart placement anywhere. His commercial identity was built entirely outside the chart apparatus, on TikTok virality and streaming-platform algorithms, which makes his catalog a useful test case for how much a mid-tier streaming artist can achieve without ever needing a chart number to prove it.
From Zoom Call to Arena Stage
Capitol Records, working in partnership with the independent label 10K Projects, home also to Artemas, signed Bissett in April 2021 while he was still finishing at Jesuit High School; his teachers found out when the rest of the world did. The years since have followed a textbook arc: opening slots for Lauv and Valley across roughly 60 combined shows in 2022 and 2023, then headline runs behind the Supernova EPs, including a sold-out stop at New York's Racket where he debuted the then-unreleased "Planet." His debut studio album, shut up and love me, released July 25, 2025, leaned into 1980s new-wave textures with an evident debt to The 1975, and reviewers reached for Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion as a comparison point for its handling of romantic nuance. Along the way he collaborated with Claire Rosinkranz on 2022's "stuck on us," a pairing that fit his catalog's consistent lyrical terrain of situationships and near-misses.
The Next Room Gets Bigger
That 2025 album cycle fed directly into the biggest jump of his career: a confirmed opening slot, alongside Riah, on LANY's 2026 Soft World Tour, with dates at Boston's Roadrunner, Brooklyn's Barclays Center, Washington D.C.'s The Anthem and Nashville's The Pinnacle. It is a leap from clubs and mid-size rooms to arenas, and it arrives without a single chart credit to his name, which is precisely the point. Bissett's career has never needed the chart to validate it. As of 2026-07, the numbers that matter to him are the ones streaming platforms count on their own: nearly 98 million plays for a song he wrote as a teenager missing his old friends, and a room in Nashville that will hold several thousand more people than that Wallows basement ever could.