In late 2022, a 21-year-old in Toronto clicked on a YouTube 'type beat' he couldn't have named the genre of, recorded a freestyle hook that night, and posted it to TikTok before he understood what publishing rights even were. Sixteen months later, that clip was sitting at No. 100 on the Billboard Hot 100. The artist behind it, ThxSoMch, still describes the whole chain of events as something that happened to him rather than something he engineered.
A Beat From São Paulo, a Hook From a Bedroom
ThxSoMch, born Carter De Filippis, had spent his teenage years as, in his own words to Dazed, a 'die-hard Yeat and Playboi Carti fan,' with no particular attachment to post-punk or goth revivalism. The beat he stumbled across belonged to Grayskies, a Brazilian high schooler producing out of São Paulo who had no idea his instrumental had been used until his manager flagged that a song built on it was 'blowing up' on TikTok. Neither party understood the mechanics of clearance or splits.
I was literally figuring out actual music industry terms. On both of our sides it was just craziness and confusion.ThxSoMch, Dazed
The song that resulted, 'Spit in My Face!,' was released independently on November 1, 2022, and it moved fast: a debut at No. 100 on the Hot 100 in the chart week of February 4, 2023, a run to No. 9 on Hot Rock Songs, and entries on charts in the UK, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Latvia. Ones to Watch called it a 'dark indie rock anthem.' Genius' annotated lyrics describe a track about love, drug influence and a real event from his life, and ThxSoMch has since admitted the opening verses began as an attempt to mimic 'Playboi Carti ad-libs' before turning into 'like a real song,' including a much-misheard lyric fans assumed was 'crank' but was actually 'crack.'
Sleez and the Live Debut
The eight-track Sleez EP followed via Elektra Records on May 19, 2023, every track paired with its own video or visualizer, an unusually visual-forward approach for a debut project. Glasse Factory called it an 'eerie edge' showcase, and Ones to Watch heard it blurring 'the angst of '90s alternative and the raw energy of 2000s SoundCloud rap.' ThxSoMch then did something he had never done: perform live. The Sleez World Tour sold out rooms across the US, UK and Europe, culminating on December 6, 2023, with a hometown show at Toronto's Bovine Sex Club, livestreamed in 360 degrees, for an artist whose entire public identity to that point had existed inside a phone screen.
Six Months in Brazil
His debut album, The Sound of You Laughing, arrived via Atlantic Records on August 29, 2025, produced almost entirely by Grayskies and mixed by Mike Crossey, whose credits include The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys. A trip planned for two weeks stretched into six months, during which the pair generated roughly 2,000 raw voice memos of Grayskies on guitar and ThxSoMch singing over him, later mining the strongest fragments into finished songs. He described the resulting isolation to REVERIE as producing 'a very anxious body of work,' and explained the title's double meaning to Dazed: insecurity paired with a compulsion to make other people laugh regardless.
A bedroom freestyle over a stranger's beat became a genre's calling card before either party understood what a genre was.
A Darkwave Tag He Never Asked For
The Guardian's 2024 feature on the darkwave revival placed ThxSoMch on an official Spotify darkwave playlist alongside Artemas and Mareux, tracing the sound back to the Cure and Depeche Mode. But the paper also noted something odd: neither ThxSoMch nor Artemas actually cites that lineage. His own reference points run through Nirvana, Crystal Castles, and the Weeknd's 'shimmering neon pop,' a mismatch that suggests the tag describes mood, not ancestry (see What Is the Darkwave Revival?).
It's hard to say what darkwave is. Artists, especially nowadays, we're not really thinking of genre when making music. We're just pulling from things we like, and the music from the past kind of becomes music of the future.ThxSoMch, The Guardian
He is, by his own account, uninterested in steering the label either way. 'I try not to navigate genres,' he told REVERIE. 'I let the genres come to me.' It is a strange kind of authorship for an artist who has spent three years watching outlets, algorithms, and playlists decide what he sounds like on his behalf, usually correctly enough to keep charting.
What the Numbers Don't Explain
ThxSoMch's catalog now exceeds a billion Spotify streams, built overwhelmingly on the strength of two songs. That imbalance would sink most careers into one-hit-wonder territory. Instead, by spring 2026 he was routing through Dallas, Atlanta, and New York's Palladium Times Square on a genuine world tour, evidence that the freestyle that started it all was never really the point. The point was a kid who clicked on a beat he couldn't classify, sang over it because it felt different, and let the rest of the internet sort out what to call it.