Most artists build toward a debut album. Timothy Evan Thomas, who records as TX2, built an audience first and let the album arrive as a coronation. By the time his 13-track debut End Of Us was announced, his pre-album singles had already crossed 100 million streams and 42 million TikTok likes, numbers most signed rock acts never reach with a full catalog behind them.
Fort Collins to Los Angeles
Thomas started on drums at age five, played garage bands across a Fort Collins, Colorado adolescence, and started the TX2 project at fifteen. American Idiot and The Black Parade were the records that pulled him through school bullying, and that emo lineage never left the music. He moved to Los Angeles and signed to Hopeless Records, the label that has long been a home base for the pop-punk and emo tradition he grew up inside.
Reverse engineering a career
The TX2 come-up ran opposite to the old model. Instead of touring a debut into existence, Thomas released a run of singles that behaved like a slow-building word-of-mouth phenomenon, each one adding to a total that eventually made the album feel inevitable. The TikTok likes were not vanity metrics. They were a live audience assembling itself in public, one song at a time.
The album was not the introduction. It was the payoff for an audience that had already shown up.
The engine that built it
The base did not assemble itself. Rejected outright by a major-label rep for having no social presence, Thomas built his own: I started making three TikToks a day and I haven't broken that cycle, he has said. The 2021 single Pull the Plug, written at a low point and openly about his mental health, drew half a million views on its teaser and passed 300,000 Spotify streams as listeners used it in their own videos. The real turn came in April 2023 with I Would Hate Me Too, a song he wrote when he was thinking about giving up. It went viral, and Hopeless Records signed him that July. Before any of it, he had won a full scholarship to the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, arriving as a rapper with a line that explains the whole pivot: rapping, he decided, is just drumming with words.
What the numbers actually mean
In 2026 TX2 holds a Heavy Music Awards nomination for Best International Breakthrough Artist and a touring calendar that runs from his own US headline dates through Black Veil Brides arenas to Download Festival. The through-line is that none of it was borrowed. The streams, the likes, the nomination and the room sizes all trace back to the same self-built base that existed before the album did.
It is a modern rock story told in reverse, and it works because the foundation was real before the release was.