Most artists build a career toward an album. Artemas has built one by refusing to release one, and as of 2026-07 the refusal has never looked more deliberate.
On March 27, 2026, the English singer-songwriter dropped getting up to no good, a ten-track, dark-edged mixtape that arrived a day before a bonus cut, "high note," got tacked on for good measure. Last Friday, he released his fifth mixtape getting up to no good, spanning just over 30 minutes for an easy listen while getting ready on a weekend night. It followed LOVERCORE, which had landed five months earlier, on October 24, 2025. Two full projects inside a single calendar year, both framed as mixtapes, neither one an album. The pattern by now is the point.
Five Tapes Deep, Still No LP
The math is almost comedic at this point: I'm Sorry I'm Like This (2022), Pretty (2024), yustyna (2024), LOVERCORE (2025) and now getting up to no good (2026), five projects and counting, and Artemas has still never called any of them a studio album. Reviewers have started to notice the discipline underneath the chaos. One fan review of the new tape put it plainly: "this guy has been consistently dropping really quality albums and mixtapes," calling out the strange consistency of it. The tape itself splits the difference between his two modes, tender falsetto confessionals bleeding into after-hours tempo, and critics keep filing it under the same loose genre tags: alt-pop, darkwave, alternative R&B, coldwave, electropop.
That number is not a rounding error. It is the return on a strategy that treats scarcity of the "official debut" as its own kind of marketing, forcing fans to treat every mixtape like an event because there is no bigger event on the horizon to wait for instead.
Selling Out Rooms Without Selling the Album Idea
The commercial case for staying in mixtape mode keeps getting stronger. The LOVERCORE Tour opened in his hometown at the Roundhouse on February 3, 2026, before crossing into North America for stops in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Miami, with Isabel LaRosa joining as support on select dates. By the time it wrapped, Artemas had racked up 75 sold-out headline shows throughout Europe, Australia and the U.S., with festival slots at Coachella, Governors Ball, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands and BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend. None of that required a debut LP to sell. If anything, the absence of one has become part of the pitch: come see the guy who keeps making the biggest songs of the year without ever formally arriving.
Five projects deep, and he still won't call any of them an album.
A BTS Detour and a First Real Album Tease
The bigger update since the last accounting of his no-album streak is what he was doing between tapes. Artemas has also been busy writing and producing for BTS's upcoming album, collaborating with Diplo, a credit that quietly places the self-taught bedroom producer inside one of the largest pop machines on the planet while his own catalog stays defiantly DIY. It is the same logic he has applied to his own songs for years: stay useful, stay busy, and let the bigger structure exist around him rather than inside him.
What makes 2026 different is that Artemas has, for the first time, started talking about an album like it is a real object rather than a hypothetical. Discussing the arc that led into LOVERCORE, he told an interviewer why the idea suddenly feels less terrifying than it used to.
It's daunting to create something that cohesive, but it excites me, too. I want to put my flag in the sand.Artemas, Uproxx
In the same conversation he was careful to draw a line between ambition and repetition, rejecting any pressure to chase the runaway success of "i like the way you kiss me" a second time.
It would be the death of me to chase that again. Those songs are so random. You just have to stay honest.Artemas, Uproxx
Why Deferring Still Works
The anti-rollout strategy works because it inverts the usual pop calculus. Instead of building anticipation for one release date and risking the letdown that comes after, Artemas keeps the anticipation permanently renewable: another mixtape, another surprise single, another tour leg, each one treated by his fanbase as though it might be the record that finally gets the album label. The approach echoes a habit that has become common currency across this generation of self-produced artists, the same instinct for constant, low-stakes output that Christian Gates built his early career on with a song-a-day cadence, and that Arden Jones has run in parallel with monthly tapes of his own. None of them are in a rush, because the rush was never the point.
For Artemas specifically, that patience is now backed by numbers that would justify a full album rollout in almost any other artist's camp: a BRIT Award nomination, a catalog past 3.6 billion streams as of 2026-03, 75-plus sold-out shows and a production credit on a BTS record, all stacked up without ever needing the word "album" to do any of the selling. The flag in the sand he mentioned to Uproxx is still, deliberately, unplanted. Five mixtapes in, that has stopped looking like hesitation and started looking like the whole strategy.